Faith, Power and Family Christianity and Social Change in French Cameroon Z01 WalkS book A.indb 1 16/04/2018 15:22 Series information: RELIGION IN TR ANSFORMING AFRIC A ISSN 2398-8673 Series Editors Barbara Bompani, Joseph Hellweg, Ousmane Kane and Emma Wild-Wood Editorial Reading Panel Robert Baum (Darmouth College) Dianna Bell (Vanderbilt University) Ezra Chitando (University of Zimbabwe) Martha Frederiks (Utrecht University) Paul Gifford (SOAS) David M. Gordon (Bowdoin College) Jörg Haustein (SOAS) Paul Lubeck (Johns Hopkins University-SAIS) Philomena Mwaura (Kenyatta University, Nairobi) Ebenezer Obadare (University of Kansas) Benjamin Soares (University of Florida & University of Amsterdam) Abdulkader I. Tayob (University of Cape Town) Stephen Wooten (University of Oregon) Series description The series is open to submissions that examine local or regional realities on the complexities of religion and spirituality in Africa. Religion in Transforming Africa will showcase cutting-edge research into continent-wide issues on Christianity, Islam and other religions of Africa; Traditional beliefs and witchcraft; Religion, culture & society; History of religion, politics and power; Global networks and new missions; Religion in conflict and peace-building processes; Religion and development; Religious rituals and texts and their role in shaping religious ideologies and theologies. Innovative and challenging current perspectives, the books provide an indispensable resource on this key area of African Studies for academics, students, international policy-makers and development practitioners. Please contact the Series Editors with an outline or download the proposal form at www.jamescurrey.com. Dr Barbara Bompani, Director of the Centre of African Studies, Reader in Africa & International Development, University of Edinburgh b.bompani@ed.ac.uk Dr Joseph Hellweg, Associate Professor of Religion, Department of Religion, Florida State University jhellweg@fsu.edu Professor Ousmane Kane, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Professor of Contemporary Islamic Religion & Society, Harvard Divinity School okane@hds.harvard.edu Dr Emma Wild-Wood, Senior Lecturer in African Christianity & African Indigenous Religions, Faculty of Divinity, University of Edinburgh emma.wildwood@ed.ac.uk Previously published title in the series: Violent Conversion: Brazilian Pentecostalism and Urban Women in Mozambique, Linda Van de Kamp (2016) Beyond Religious Tolerance: Muslim, Christian & Traditionalist Encounters in an African Town, edited by Insa Nolte, Olukoya Ogen and Rebecca Jones (2017) Z01 WalkS book A.indb 2 16/04/2018 15:22 Faith, Power and Family Christianity and Social Change in French Cameroon CHARLOTTE WALKER-SAID Z01 WalkS book A.indb 3 16/04/2018 15:22 Contents List of Illustrations viii Note on the Cover Image ix Acknowledgments x List of Abbreviations xiv Maps xv 1 Introduction: Marriage at the Nexus of Faith, Power, and Family 1 Part I French Rule, Social Politics, and New Religious Communities, 1914–1925 2 Christian Transmission and Colonial Imposition 53 3 African Catechists and Charismatic Activities 79 4 Evaluating Marriage and Forming a Virtuous Household 101 5 Faith, Family, and the Endurance of the Lineage 141 Part II Labor, Economic Transformation and Family Life, 1925–1939 6 African Church Institutions in Action 173 7 African Agents of the Church and State: Male Violence and Productivity 209 8 Ethical Masculinity: The Church and the Patriarchal Order 237 9 The Significance of African Christian Communities Beyond Cameroon 271 Bibliography 285 Index 309 Z01 WalkS book A.indb 7 16/04/2018 15:22 xv 1 The Equatorial Forest Zone Z01 WalkS book A.indb 15 16/04/2018 15:22 xvi 2 Major roads and railroads in Cameroon, 1914–1944 Z01 WalkS book A.indb 16 16/04/2018 15:22 xvii 3 Regional boundaries and administrative centers of Cameroon, 1944 Z01 WalkS book A.indb 17 16/04/2018 15:22 xix 5 Primary Catholic mission stations and larger secondary mission outposts in the French-governed Cameroon territory, 1914–1939 Z01 WalkS book A.indb 19 16/04/2018 15:22 xx 6 Primary and secondary Catholic missions in the Yaoundé region, 1914–1939 Z01 WalkS book A.indb 20 16/04/2018 15:22 xxi 7 Presbyterian missions in the French-governed Cameroon territory, 1914–1939 Z01 WalkS book A.indb 21 16/04/2018 15:22 CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Marriage at the Nexus of Faith, Power and Family On April 29, 1927, the African catechist Jean Bell whipped a local Catholic man, Matthias Bakatal, after he discovered through rumors in the village of Mangen Mandyok that Bakatal had secretly married a second wife, despite marrying his first wife according to the sacrament several years prior. Bell confronted Bakatal, saying to him, “You live like a pagan. You must come to confess.” Bakatal then confessed to the French priests in the nearby Nlong Mission and received the sacrament of reconciliation, after which Bell assumed responsibility for deciding Bakatal’s penance, which included divorcing his second wife, saying two rosaries per day for two weeks, and corporal punishment. Bell declared to Bakatal, “You must do public penitence because you were the subject of public scandal. I will beat you at the door of the chapel. Better to receive punishment now than in hell.”1 And so Jean Bell meted out twenty lashes to Matthais Bakatal before God and the missionaries in the Nlong chapel doorway, a liminal space that perhaps symbolically reminded the malefactor that he occupied a precarious position in the Catholic community. African Christian men in French-administered Cameroon were both architects and targets of the strident religious rhetoric and intensive activism that characterized Christian evangelism in the southern regions of the territory between World War I and II. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Christianity became a global religion and many African societies assumed a tenacious hold on the faith, using its tenets and institutions to reflect and adapt their existing worldviews.2 French Cameroon during the 1 2 Archives de la Congrégation des Pères du Saint-Esprit, Chevilly-Larue (hereafter ACSSp.), 2J21a Journal de la Mission Pierre Claver de Nlong, 29 avril 1927. The literature on Christianity in Africa is extensive, but those who have contributed the most to revealing the work of African societies in mobilizing evangelical forces and generating resonant rhetoric and activities necessary for organic and widespread Christian transmission include Karen Elise Fields, Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Elizabeth Elbourne, Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008); Z01 WalkS book A.indb 1 16/04/2018 15:22 2 INTRODUCTION interwar decades provides a unique example of a diverse and competitive set of populations who became familiarized with Christianity through correspondingly competitive and diverse cadres of indigenous and foreign evangelists, and crafted a particularly assertive religion that provoked profound responses from those both inside and outside of African faith communities. As the example of Matthias Bakatal shows, and as this study will reveal, Africans in Cameroon experienced the upheaval attendant with Christian conversion most frequently and poignantly in their family lives. This upheaval was concomitant with powerful economic, political, and legal changes that challenged conventional strategies for building one’s family and reshaped its place in secular and religious life.3 Between the late nineteenth century and 1960, when Cameroon was governed by successive European powers, close to 800,000 Africans converted to Catholic or Protestant Christianity and fundamentally transformed religious culture in the territory.4 From the first appearance of foreign missionaries in Cameroon, indigenous translators and instructors evangelized alongside them, crafting accessible religious 3 4 Z01 WalkS book A.indb 2 J.D.Y. Peel, Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003); Paul Stuart Landau, The Realm of the Word: Language, Gender, and Christianity in a Southern African Kingdom (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995). I am sensitive here and throughout this book to the concerns of Talal Asad regarding the recent formulations of “secular” modernity and the absolutist practices that “strip away … myth, magic, and the sacred” from “direct reality.” See Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 13–14. While familiar with local southern Cameroonian societies’ beliefs regarding the constantly communicative interfaces of the world of the spirit and the world of lived experience, I employ the term ‘secular’ to refer to experiences and processes that Cameroonians whom I interviewed described as being outside the category of the supernatural in this period and place. Statistics vary between Catholic, Protestant, and French government sources, but overall, estimates of Christians from all denominations in Cameroon between 1950 and 1960 hover between 700,000 and 800,000 souls. Philippe Laburthe-Tolra estimates that in 1943 there were 400,000 Christians in Cameroon, of which roughly 65–80,000 were Protestant. Philippe Laburthe-Tolra, Vers La Lumiere? Ou, Le Désir d’Ariel: A Propos Des Beti Du Cameroun: Sociologie de La Conversion (Paris: Karthala, 1999), 20. By 1960, missionary and government records point to a jump in recorded Christians to between 700,000 and 800,000. See Rapport de la 28ème Conférence des Missionaires du Cameroun, Journal des Missions Evangéliques, 1950, 340–60; Roger Onomo Etaba, Histoire de l’Eglise Catholique Du Cameroun de Grégoire XVI à Jean-Paul II (Paris: Editions de L’Harmattan, 2007); Jean Paul Messina and Jaap Van Slageren, Histoire Du Christianisme Au Cameroun: Des Origines à Nos Jours : Approche Oecuménique (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2005), 67–87. 16/04/2018 15:22 MARRIAGE AT THE NEXUS OF FAITH, POWER, & FAMILY 3 vernaculars and adapting new forms of reverence to local disciplines of spirituality.5 Cameroonians in the current day consider African Protestant and Catholic catechists who formed the first communities of believers in the late nineteenth century as pioneers of the Christian faith in the nation.6 At the onset of French and British military incursion in German Kamerun in 1914 and the flight of German and other foreign missionaries during the next two years, African proselyte agents assumed a new, privileged place in religious transmission in the territory and capitalized on their unimpaired autonomy to communicate Christianity on their own terms.7 Throughout the next several decades, European missionary workers were eclipsed in disseminating Christian messages by African evangelists, who shared what historian Lamin 5 6 7 For the limits and successes of Christian inculturation in the German colonial period in Cameroon, see Philippe Laburthe-Tolra, “La Mission Catholique Allemande Du Cameroun (1890–1916) et La Missologie,” in Diffusion et Acculturation Du Christianisme (XIXe–XXe s.) Vingt-Cinq Ans de Recherches Missiologiques Par Le CREDIC, ed. Jean Comby (Paris: Karthala, 2005), 227–49. And Jean-Paul Messina, Le Centenaire de la Conversion André Mbangue, le premier chrétien camerounais (Yaoundé: Université de Yaoundé, 1988). Many interviews I conducted revealed that devout Cameroonians are more likely to emphasize the role of early African evangelists like Andreas (André) Mbangue, Modi Din Jacob, Pius Ottou, and Lotin A Same, rather than foreign missionaries, in Christianizing African communities. Catholics from western Cameroon whom I interviewed referenced the catechists who returned from Fernando Po in Spanish Guinea as their community’s faith founders. Common prayers and local histories also commonly refer to these figures. Oral interviews, Félix Penda, Adèle Nimboh, Nicolas Déa on July 6, 2007 in Kribi, Cameroon; oral interview, John the Baptist Zamcho Anyeh, S.J. on May 25, 2014, Maison Jesuite, Mvolyé, Cameroon. See also Séverin Alega Mbele, “Entretien Avec Le Père Olivier Paulin Awoumou, Curé de Mvolyé et Membre de La Société de l’Apostolat Catholique,” Cameroon-Info, May 21, 2001, http://www.cameroon-info. net/stories/0,6908,@,mvolye-a-cent-ans-un-siecle-d-histoire.html [accessed January 13, 2017]. The African “roots” of Christianity has been a common theme of conferences and colloquia, both within Christian Churches and in national histories. See the analysis of the Société Africaine de Culture (SAC), at the Second Vatican Council, 1962, and Société africaine de culture, Civilisation noire et Église catholique : colloque d’Abidjan, 12–17 septembre 1977 (Paris: Présence africaine, 1978). While all German Protestant and Catholic missionaries and many of their auxiliaries were forced to leave in 1914, the American Presbyterian Mission was granted permission to remain in the territory during French campaigns in Kamerun and throughout the negotiations with Great Britain before and during the Treaty of Versailles. The French administration, however, remained wary of a non-French presence in Cameroon and relations remained tense, albeit courteous, between the American Presbyterian Mission and the French mandate government in the interwar period. See the orders of Governor Lucien Fourneau, Archives Nationales de Cameroun (hereafter ANC) Affaires Politiques et Administrative (hereafter APA) 10384. See also Louis-Paul Ngongo, Histoire des forces religieuses au Cameroun (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 1982), 17–29. Z01 WalkS book A.indb 3 16/04/2018 15:22 4 INTRODUCTION Sanneh calls the “cross-border promises” of Christianity, integrating them into the structures of everyday life.8 Of all the Christian sacraments (the outward signs, consisting of actions and words and symbolizing a certain grace) that moved confessional loyalties in Cameroon in the interwar years, marriage became the most exalted, coveted, and controversial.9 Inspired by catechist instruction and pastoral preaching on Godly love, and empowered by the missions’ protective interventions to “emancipate” them from polygamous marriages, African women throughout southern Cameroon challenged their existing marriages and pursued new, companionate marriages during the interwar decades.10 Christian coupling also became rapidly popularized as it promised to extend men the power to refuse bridewealth obligations and even to guide women to “new life” in Christ with Christian men, thus granting males of common status the power to realign loyalties and obligations to elders and elites and assume guardianship over women. Concurrent with these spiritual and social dynamics, African marriages in their Christian and non-Christian forms were assailed by the profane forces of political subjugation and economic disruption inherent to 8 9 10 Z01 WalkS book A.indb 4 Lamin Sanneh, Whose Religion Is Christianity?: The Gospel Beyond the West (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2003), 57. The extensive historiography on Christian marriage and the transformation of indigenous marriage practices in Cameroon over the twentieth century – written largely by Cameroonian scholars – attests to centrality of marriage and the history of African marriage rites and forms in the cultures of Cameroon. See Antoine Essomba Fouda, Le Mariage Chrétien Au Cameroun : Une Réalité Anthropologique, Civile et Sacramentelle (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010); Manga Bekombo, “La Femme, Le Mariage et La Compensation Matrimoniale En Pays Dwala,” L’Ethnographie 62–3 (69 1968): 179–88; Jacques Binet, “Le Mariage et l’évolution de La Société Sud-Camerounaise,” L’Afrique Française. Bulletin Mensuel Du Comité de l’Afrique Française, Du Comité Du Maroc et Du Comité Algérie-Tunisie-Maroc 62, no. 6 (1953): 40–2; Jean-Marie Vianney Balegamire A. Koko, Mariage Africain et Mariage Chrétien (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003); Michel Legrain, L’Eglise catholique et le mariage en Occident et en Afrique (Tome II): L’ébranlement de l’édifice matrimonial (Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 2009); Luc Ndjodo, Le Mariage Chrétien Chez Les Beti (Douala: Yonga & Partners, 1997); Henri Ngoa, “Le Mariage chez les Ewondo: Étude sociologique” (Sorbonne, 1968); J.R. Owono Nkoudou, “Le Problème Du Mariage Dotal Au Cameroun Français,” Études Camerounaises 39–40 (March 1953): 41–83. On the spiritual inspirations for conjugal love, see Société des Missions Evangéliques de Paris (hereafter SMEP)/Service Protestant de Missions Défap (hereafter DEFAP) Eglise Evangélique du Cameroun (hereafter EEC) divers 2/2 Culte de mariage: Mitin ma diba momene 1930; “Foyer d’Amour,” Lettre d’Élie Allégret à J. Bianquis, Douala, 3 March 1921; ACSSp. 2J1.11a2 “La charité regne,” Rapport sur les missions de Lobetal et Douala, 1935. 16/04/2018 15:22 MARRIAGE AT THE NEXUS OF FAITH, POWER, & FAMILY 5 French colonialism after World War I.11 Local proselytizers captivated considerable numbers of unmarried men by professing the shibboleth of “the right of the African man to a wife” – a message that intrigued those denied access to wives by their low status, poverty, or political or family position.12 Marriage is a particularly useful prism through which to examine Christian conversion in an African context because it is simultaneously a singular action and a manner of living that expresses particular beliefs.13 Although Cameroon’s diverse societies sanctioned varied and distinctive marriage practices throughout their histories, it is clear that for the individual and the community, marriage was more than a simple act; it was a worldview. In myriad forms and processes, marriage constituted a place of belonging, defined personal and group identity, and anchored all social and economic life. The transformation of matrimonial systems to reflect Christian doctrine in many of Cameroon’s societies denotes broad commitments to adapt cultural systems, which, Cameroonian theologian Antoine Essomba Fouda concludes, registered the value and costs of different approaches to forging unions between individuals and alliances between collectivities.14 Moreover, evidence of everyday people’s underlying motivations for engaging and remaining in Christian marriages can reveal a conversion process that Robin Horton described as “a cognitive 11 12 13 14 Albert Sarraut’s thesis on Cameroon’s mise en valeur and the African colonies’ role in restoring French financial solvency sheds light on the administrative rationale for brutal forced labor policies. Albert Sarraut, La Mise En Valeur Des Colonies Francaises (Paris: Payot & Compagnie, 1923). Président Louis Marin et le Groupe parlementaire des missions, “La reglementation des marriages entre indigènes en Afrique Occidental Francaise et Afrique Equatoriale Francaise,” Session du 16 juin 1939, Journal Officiel du Cameroun, 1939. The literature on marriage in Africa is extensive, and is elaborated further in this chapter, but this analysis owes a particular debt to histories of marriage in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Africa, during the tumultuous period of early colonial encounter and the end of the slave trade, when “marriage” was frequently being interpreted along many economic, socio-cultural, and religious lines. See in particular, Richard Roberts, Litigants and Households: African Disputes and Colonial Courts in the French Soudan, 1895–1912 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2005); Marie Rodet, “‘Under the Guise of Guardianship and Marriage’: Mobilizing Juvenile and Female Labor in the Aftermath of Slavery in Kayes, French Soudan, 1900–1939,” in Trafficking in Slavery’s Wake: Law and the Experience of Women and Children in Africa, ed. Richard L. Roberts and Benjamin Lawrance (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2012), 86–100. Fouda, Le Mariage Chrétien Au Cameroun : Une Réalité Anthropologique, Civile et Sacramentelle, 44–4. Z01 WalkS book A.indb 5 16/04/2018 15:22 6 INTRODUCTION and practical adjustment to changes in social experience”15 rather than a hegemonic exercise of colonial power.16 In the period encompassing French military incursion and German evacuation from Cameroon in 1914 to the French Third Republic’s declaration of war against Germany in 1939 and the subsequent (re)departure of a large number of foreign personnel from Cameroon to serve on the European war front, roughly 400,000 Africans converted to Catholic or Protestant Christianity.17 15 16 17 Z01 WalkS book A.indb 6 Robin Horton, “On the Rationality of Conversion. Part I,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 45, no. 3 (1975): 219–35. See also Peel, Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba, 3. Many histories of Christianity in Africa have attributed the reorganization of cultural patterns to unequal relations of power between foreign missionaries and colonized local populations, arguing that forms of cultural, religious, and political “hegemony” transformed African consciousness. See, in particular, Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 1: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 2: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, 1 edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Georges Dupré, Un Ordre et Sa Destruction (Paris: ORSTOM, 1982). Statistics of conversion vary by denomination and missionary society, but, in aggregate, the numbers point to roughly 400,000 Africans in Cameroon becoming counted as part of Christian congregations and communities and performing Christian rituals, including the baptismal rite, between 1914 and 1939. Laburthe-Tolra estimates that in 1938, there were 300,000 recorded Catholics and between 65,000 and 80,000 Protestants in Cameroon. Laburthe-Tolra, Vers La Lumiere? Ou, Le Désir d’Ariel: A Propos Des Beti Du Cameroun: Sociologie de La Conversion, 20. However, newspaper reports have slightly different numbers. The 1938 issue of the Belgian newspaper, Vers l’Avenir, reported 325,000 Catholics in 1939. “l’Etonnante progression des catholiques au Cameroun,” Vers l’Avenir, 9 janvier 1939, no. 9. Catholic mission logs report that between 1938 and 1939, roughly 300,000 to 350,000 Catholics participated in mass or received baptism or the Eucharist. Records of Protestants are more difficult, as each denomination was smaller and many, like the Native Baptist Church, were overseen by African principals who did not report to the Paris Evangelical Evangelical Missionary Society. But estimates range between 65,000 and 80,000 Protestants in Cameroon by the start of World War II. See ACSSp. 2J1.13b1 “Informations catholiques”; Vicaires apostoliques du Cameroun, “Le catholicisme au Cameroun,” Informations Catholiques Internationales, 44th edition, 15 March 1957; Engelbert Mveng, Album Du Centenaire: 1890–1990: L’Eglise Catholique Au Cameroun, 100 Ans d’évangélisation (Yaoundé: Conférence Episcopale National du Cameroun, 1990), 46–7. André Retif, “Le Cameroun sera-t-il chrétien?” La Croix, 9 December 1954; SMEP/DEFAP, Papiers Jean Keller, Carton V, Fédération Evangélique du Cameroun et de l’Afrique Equatoriale, P.V. de réunion du Conseil à Ngaoundéré, 17–20 January 1953, 1–2. The number of African Christians in the territory should also be contextualized within the total population of Cameroon, which the 1924 French military census report claimed was 2,540,000. It is crucial to acknowledge that census data taken during the colonial period was not 16/04/2018 15:22 MARRIAGE AT THE NEXUS OF FAITH, POWER, & FAMILY 7 In this brief but important era, African Christians retained their understanding of marriage as a worldview while unsettling previous spiritual and material ideas about coupling, family-building, and community coherence. This approach reassesses the presumptive “death” or “destruction” of longstanding cultural systems and rather seeks to uncover community adaptations.18 It also works to question assumed demarcations between the political and religious realms and the public and private spheres in Africa.19 Many previous studies on marriage in Africa have hesitated to disentangle all the human concerns – in particular, personal spirituality – that determined a marriage’s endorsement or dissolution in the colonial context.20 In the decades between Europeans’ two major departures and returns, African evangelists across the Cameroon territory translated the Bible, administered liturgical and sacramental rituals, and instructed the dogmas of Christianity while simultaneously promoting the benefits of a new sexual and social morality that attacked the claims of local patriarchs to decide marriages within their lineages and the power of administration-backed chiefs to acquire large numbers of wives and female clients. Achille Mbembe has noted that 18 19 20 highly reliable in terms of representing overall population demographics, as collection of census data was unpopular and was closely identified with tax collection and labor recruitment. Regardless, that figure is the statistic available. Archives du Service Historique de l’Armée, Vincennes, Dossier 5H6/D1, Commission Interministerielle des troupes indigènes, 2eme sous-commission rapport, “Recrutement” 1924. This book reassesses arguments made in Vansina’s history of the rainforest basin in central and central–west Africa in which the “equatorial tradition” of social organization based on kinship experienced “death” as a result of colonial political integration and missionary Christianity. See Jan Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests. Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 239–48. Emily Osborn also troubles the line between “public” and “private” in her work, reminding historians that household making and statecraft are one and the same in West Africa. Emily Lynn Osborn, Our New Husbands Are Here: Households, Gender, and Politics in a West African State from the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2011), 3. Many previous works on marriage in Africa, such as Kristin Mann, Marrying Well: Marriage, Status, and Social Change among the Educated Elite in Colonial Lagos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), argue for Christian marriage as mainly an economic and social choice and do not engage with the influence of personal faith, expressions of piety, or psychological attachment. Other, more recent histories have appealed for analyses of marriage in Africa that explore more than economic and social power relations between the sexes and engage with the history of emotions. See Stephanie Newell, The Forger’s Tale: The Search for Odeziaku, 1 edition (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006); Jennifer Cole, Love in Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Conjugal Rights: Marriage, Sexuality, and Urban Life in Colonial Libreville, Gabon (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014). Z01 WalkS book A.indb 7 16/04/2018 15:22 8 INTRODUCTION the “hierarchies, different roles and positions, remunerations and privileges” created by the colonial regime in Cameroon resulted in “unequal fortunes.”21 The inequitable order generated by decentralized colonial governance and a competitive market economy, worsened by the violence of forced labor and village dislocation – with attendant periodic famine and epidemic – engendered furious struggles among African men over the most productive and scarce resources: wives and children. In an entirely new way, “the problem of evil,” as Cameroonian theologian Engelbert Mveng summarizes, “entered into everyday people’s lives and violations of alliances, marriage, and paternity … situated in conversations about God.”22 Elizabeth Foster, who has explored Christian conversion in colonial Senegal, confirms that marriage “lay at the heart of missionary conversion strategy.”23 French Catholic missionaries considered monogamous unions to be essential to the creation of Christian families and future generations of African Catholics, and thus, facilitating Christian marriage became a key objective of foreign evangelizers in the empire, often in defiance of local procedures, norms, and conventional wisdom.24 However, the history of Cameroon demonstrates that monogamous, enduring, freely chosen marriage was not only a civilizing ambition emanating from foreign powers, it was coextended by local religious principals and became a highly charged symbolic act that reconstituted the roles and relations of elders, families, and lineages.25 While it often stood in tension with old and new practices governing the political and 21 22 23 24 25 Z01 WalkS book A.indb 8 Achille Mbembe, La Naissance Du Maquis Dans Le Sud-Cameroun, 1920–1960 : Histoire Des Usages de La Raison En Colonie (Paris: Karthala, 1996), 8. Engelbert Mveng, L’Art d’Afrique Noire: Liturgie Cosmique et Langage Religieux (Paris: Mame, 1964), 122. Elizabeth Foster, Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 147. There is also a considerable literature on the evolutions of marriage and the reform of polygamy in colonized spaces in Africa that was not the result of Christian influence, including Barbara Cooper, Marriage in Maradi: Gender and Culture in a Hausa Society in Niger, 1900–1989 (Portsmouth, NH and Oxford: Heinemann, 1997); Emily S. Burrill, States of Marriage: Gender, Justice, and Rights in Colonial Mali, New African Histories (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2015); Osborn, Our New Husbands Are Here: Households, Gender, and Politics in a West African State from the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule. Histories chronicling the importation of Christian marriage models in colonial spaces are extensive and focus heavily on the acts and beliefs of Europeans, often positioning Christian marriage doctrine as a set of imposed protocols. The most notable of these are Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002); Mann, Marrying Well: Marriage, Status, and Social Change among the Educated Elite in Colonial Lagos. See also Eileen J. Suárez Findlay, Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality 16/04/2018 15:22 MARRIAGE AT THE NEXUS OF FAITH, POWER, & FAMILY 9 economic worlds of African societies, Christian marriage grew in popularity as it became known as an essential rite through which to receive God’s grace as well as a means of acceding to the right – derived from faith – to a matrimonial life.26 Critically, it was African Christian leaders’ refinement and reformation of matrimony and family alliance-building, and the process of crafting and circulating the vehement criticisms and enthusiastic devotional practices that allowed this to occur, that brought about a fully “local” Church, embedded in the kinship structures and relational strategies of southern Cameroon’s societies, decades before the formal conferral of ecclesiastical control of the Churches to African leaders during decolonization.27 The Family and the World of the Spirit In Cameroon, nascent beliefs about the sanctity of monogamous, Churchsanctioned marriage intersected with longstanding convictions regarding the numinous character of the family and its transcendence in and interface with the World of the Spirit.28 African Christian families constituted a power- 26 27 28 and Race in Puerto Rico, 1870–1920 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Sally Engle Merry, Colonizing Hawai’i (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). Oral interview, Fr. Philippe Azeufack, S.J., Résidence St. François Xavier, Yaoundé, Cameroon, May 30, 2014. Fr. Azeufack stated that since the Catholic mass was said in Latin, which almost no one understood, rites and rituals in which laypersons participated, as well as songs sung in local vernaculars, held intense power and significance. Regarding the right to marriage and the juridical dispositions that the Catholic Church formulated to help people understand their claims to matrimony, see Summa theologiae, Supplementum, Q. 67, a. 1, ad 4th; Catechism of Trent, Part II, VII, §§ 13–14; as well as Catholic Church, The Catechism of the Council of Trent, trans. John A. McHugh and Charles J. Callan, Reprint edition (Rockford, IL: Tan Books and Publishers, 1992). And in the Christian Bible, see Hebrews 13:4; 1 Timothy 4:1–5; 1 Corinthians 7:39; 2 Corinthians 5:17. The literature on the transfer of authority within the Christian Churches to African indigenous ecclesiastical leaders at the end of empire is not vast. Some notable texts include Roger Pasquier, La jeunesse ouvrière chrétienne en Afrique noire (1930–1950) (Paris: Karthala, 2013) and François Constantin and Christian Coulon, Religion et Transition Démocratique En Afrique (Paris: Karthala, 1997). Elizabeth Foster is writing a new book on efforts to “Africanize” the Church hierarchy and movements to create an authentically “African” Church in the years just prior to and just after decolonization. This book engages most thoroughly with the societies of the southern forest zone in Cameroon, including the Beti and Bulu groups, as well the peoples of the eastern southern forests including the Maka, Gbaya, and the Mkako. Each of these linguistically and culturally distinct peoples developed singular cosmologies, but scholars of these societies’ pre-Christian belief systems confirm the centrality of kinship and the relevance of the conjugal bond and its reproductive capacities to understandings of supernatural power and the “invisible world” (to borrow from the reference to the spiritual world Z01 WalkS book A.indb 9 16/04/2018 15:22 10 INTRODUCTION ful medium opposing the predatory powers operating in colonial Cameroon that threatened individuals and African society at large. Historians of Africa and African theologians have developed an unintentional consensus regarding what Julie Livingston refers to as “the overarching unity of the natural, cosmological, and social realms” in which Africans in history and the present have considered the health, protection, and wealth of their families to depend on spiritual forces as well as material and human resources.29 Cameroonian theologian Fabien Eboussi-Boulaga concurs that the “unity and communion” of the family models the moral community of the faith, and that both are immortalized in “the other world where souls gather” as well as in here on earth.30 Peter Geschiere’s work – also focusing on Cameroon – has similarly called attention to the household and family as the wellsprings of supernatural belief since intimate human relations shape the landscape in which sacred or unholy forces act.31 Geschiere’s contention that, “In Africa, belief systems seem to reflect tensions within a community,” is taken one step further in Derek Peterson’s history of East Africa, where passionate convictions about civil order or personal salvation were anchored in the variably redeeming or confining interdependencies of family life.32 29 30 31 32 used by many societies in southern Cameroon). See in particular, Philippe LaburtheTolra, Les Seigneurs de La Forêt: Essai Sur Le Passé Historique, l’organisation Sociale et Les Norms Éthiques Des Anciens Béti Du Cameroun (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1981), 350–78; Pierre Mviena, Univers Culturel et Religieux Du Peuple Beti (Yaoundé: Imprimerie Saint-Paul, 1970) as well as Elisabeth Copet-Rougier, “Étude de La Transformation Du Mariage Chez Les Mkako Du Cameroun,” in Transformations of African Marriage, ed. David Nyamwaya and David J. Parkin (Manchester and Wolfeboro, NH: Manchester University Press, for the International African Institute, 1987), 75–91; Philip Burnham, Elisabeth Copet-Rougier, and Philip Noss, “Gbaya et Mkako : Contribution Ethno-Linguistique à l’Histoire de l’Est-Cameroun,” Paideuma 32 (1986): 87–128. For related scholarship on the centrality of the family in witchcraft practices in Cameroon, see Peter Geschiere and Cyprian Fisiy, “Domesticating Personal Violence: Witchcraft, Courts and Confessions in Cameroon,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 64, no. 3 (1994): 323–41; Peter Geschiere, Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust: Africa in Comparison (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Julie Livingston, Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005). See also David L. Schoenbrun, “Conjuring the Modern in Africa: Durability and Rupture in Histories of Public Healing between the Great Lakes of East Africa,” The American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (2006): 1403–39. F. Eboussi-Boulaga, Christianity Without Fetishes: An African Critique and Recapture of Christianity, 1st edition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984), 59. Peter Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1997); Geschiere, Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust. Geschiere, Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust, 166. Z01 WalkS book A.indb 10 16/04/2018 15:22 MARRIAGE AT THE NEXUS OF FAITH, POWER, & FAMILY 11 Peterson provides two interrelated accounts of how African families were origin points for social criticism that evolved into broad-scale movements in East Africa. The first describes the emergence of “ethnic patriotism,” where conservative beliefs about gendered, family-centered roles patterned agendas for the enforcement of political responsibilities and social duties within the ethnic patria. The second details the East African Revival, where Christian revivalists resisted patriots’ gendered impositions and obligations for family members and renounced the liabilities of kinship.33 Like the Luo patriots Peterson describes, Cameroonian Christian men were insecure in their rights over wives and families, and sought to reform the rules and processes that governed coupling, intimacy, and reproduction.34 Hampered by migration, imprisonment, or labor cycles, marriages in French Cameroon – as in British Kenya – “were never fixed, stable, or finished,” as Peterson states, and Christians sought to restore family unity and communitarian ethics through religious practice.35 However, Christians in French Cameroon were very distinct from East African revivalists, who perceived the awesome obligations of family as obstructing spiritual fulfillment. Indeed, Cameroon’s Christian leaders largely sought to enhance their responsibility for wives and kin as part of complete religious exercise. Because family is central to the “interpretive act” of religious conversion as well as fundamental to the architecture of African cosmologies, this study takes into account enduring and evolving conceptualizations of “family” in Africa and how this entity is consubstantial with faith in divine power.36 In interwar Cameroon, the marriages of young Christian couples did not simply generate a unidirectional momentum for the spiritual metamorphosis of future generations; they were also borne back into the past by inspiring their parents’ baptisms and marriage sacraments. In many instances, prominent patriarchs lent their authority to the validity of Christianity following conversions by their children. Thus, the monogamous Christian conjugal household continued to play an important role in the life of the lineage. This work demonstrates that the piety and prestige attendant with Christianity greatly 33 34 35 36 Derek R. Peterson, Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Peterson, 138. Peterson, 130. Gauri Viswanathan describes the conversion experience as “an interpretive act, an index of material and social conflicts” that does not reject the experience of “epiphany” or metaphysical experience, but rather locates religious subjectivity more precisely in relation to the culture that produces, inhibits, or modifies it. See Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold – Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 4. Z01 WalkS book A.indb 11 16/04/2018 15:22 12 INTRODUCTION appealed to both young and old men seeking to establish or reestablish positions of authority in the domestic sphere, and that these were mutually reinforcing influences. Widespread Christian conversion in French Cameroon did not dismantle the lineage structure, but rather deployed new conjugal family units to buttress lineage and community systems that were disintegrating as a result of economic and political pressures. It also argues that young Christian women and men seeking new kinds of marriages were not always resolutely repudiating the past. The incorporation of broad segments of African society into Christian congregations – usually through African catechists’ proselytization of their families, lineages, and communities – illustrates that religious reform was tied to understandings of traditions that shaped the bonds of human dependence. Common preoccupations with new kinds of subjugation, companionlessness, corruption, debt, inequality, and instability inspired new systems for protection and justice but also evoked what Albert Camus referred to as a “nostalgia for ethics,” or the rebel’s sensibility to repudiate evil by calling forth a romantic past of unity.37 Throughout this book, Christian marriage and family-building are explored as both individual acts and subjects of collective religious and social mobilization that contained expressions of rebellion and resistance, as well as devotion and obedience. Land, People, and Authority To elucidate more precisely the relationships, techniques, and disruptions that characterized colonization, this book frames its study in the tropical forest zone in southern Cameroon. Specifically, the book’s evidence base is largely drawn from the area along and south of the Sanaga River to the southern boundary of Cameroon, including the littoral zone south of Douala, but also includes some evidence from the region surrounding the Douala hinterland north of the Sanaga River in proximity to the Noun and the Mbam Rivers (see Map 1). The book’s analyses also occasionally refer to evidence from the plateaus of western Cameroon (west of the Noun River to the western boundary of the territory) to identify common orientations and phenomena where they exist. Cameroon’s idiosyncratic linguistic and cultural diversity presents a challenge for drawing broad conclusions about societies across the entire southern forest region, and even more so if one includes analysis of coastal or western highland societies. Therefore, I borrow from Mbembe’s territorial referent of terroir that that relies upon environmental and social geography and the positioning of colonial infrastructure projects to demonstrate prevalent or 37 Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, First Vintage Interntional Edition (New York: Random House, 1991), 53. Z01 WalkS book A.indb 12 16/04/2018 15:22 MARRIAGE AT THE NEXUS OF FAITH, POWER, & FAMILY 13 coincident social, political, and religious developments across the forest zone’s linguistically and culturally diverse societies. Rather than relying purely on ethno-linguistic markers of space and social identity, Mbembe’s approach allows the historian to identify the matrix of systems of agricultural organization, notions of property, and social dynamics, as well as the “political, symbolic, and imaginary” structures alive in African communities that came into contact with the “principal colonial events” of railroad building, road expansion, labor organization, and taxation.38 Throughout the period of French administration, the economic and ethnolinguistic identities of different terroirs were affected by the grand axes of commercial traffic, which included the North and Central railway lines as well as roads, which expanded considerably farther south and west, including a major roadway north-westward toward AbongMbang, Doumé, and Bertoua (see Map 2). In 1924, the French administration began encouraging household cocoa cultivation along the axis that runs northward from the Wouri Valley along the line of the Chemin de Fer du Nord from Douala to Nkongsamba (see Map 2),39 and simultaneously supported large plantations of administrationbacked chiefs and elites who managed coffee, groundnut, and tobacco farms.40 This region was home to Bamileke, Bamoun, and Tikar peoples who, in this period, negotiated with the French administration as well as each other to delimit or assert control over cultivatable lands. Beginning in 1924, progressively interspersed populations of Banen, Bassa, Ngumba, and Bulu peoples expanded cocoa cultivation across the littoral zone near Edea, Bipindi, Ebolowa, and Kribi. The Central Railway line from Douala to Mbalmayo – which reached Yaoundé in 1927 and cemented it as the territory’s capital – linked the towns along the southwestern littoral to export markets. The Ntem, Nyong-et-Sanaga, and Haut Nyong regions surrounding Yaoundé quickly developed into the territory’s cocoa belt and also saw the rapid development of palm oil agriculture, as well as palm oil extraction and processing (see Map 3).41 Here, Bulu, Ngumba, and various Beti societies, including 38 39 40 41 Mbembe, La Naissance Du Maquis Dans Le Sud-Cameroun, 1920–1960, 41–4. Mbembe, 65. Archives Nationale d’Outre-Mer (hereafter ANOM) Agence Économique de la France d’Outre-Mer (hereafter AGEFOM) 799/1858 Cournarie Rapports sur le cacao, 1929–1932; Rapport de la Tournée Effectuée dans la Subdivision de Nkongsamba, M. Angelini, 1933; Jean-René Brutsch, “Région du Mungo, subdivision de Nkongsamba, Cameroun” (carte figurant les églises et les écoles catholiques et protestantes), document cartographique manuscrit, 1 sept. 1952. Local populations’ lives and modes of production in Cameroon’s Nyong et Sanaga, Haut Nyong, Lom et Kadei, and Ntem regions were radically affected by the commercialization of cocoa. By 1950, these regions constituted 7 percent of world cocoa production. Z01 WalkS book A.indb 13 16/04/2018 15:22 14 INTRODUCTION Eton, Ewondo, Bane, Manguissa, Etenga, and Mvele, increasingly interacted with each other at markets, trading centers, courts, and churches, as well as with peoples who were conscripted from neighboring regions or who migrated in order to reach burgeoning urban or market zones, such as Maka, Gbaya, and Kaka peoples.42 This book’s primary focus on the southern forest region along the Central Railway as well as along the roads emanating from Douala toward Edea and Eseka, the roads surrounding Yaoundé, including toward the southwestern coastal zones of Ebolowa and Kribi, the southern roads to Mbalmayo, Sangmelima, and Djoum, and the northeastern roads to Akonolinga, Abong Mbang, and Doumé, relies on a host of evidence from administration, industry, and mission sources that frequently refer to each other. Between 1919 and 1929, the French administration vigorously executed a program of economic and social reorganization across the entire southern forest zone to rapidly expand the infrastructure that could facilitate the export of raw natural resources extracted by European concessionary companies, as well as cash crops produced by African households and African and European plantation managers.43 This endeavor required an exacting régime du travail that depended on requisitioned male labor (and eventually would include women and children) organized by administration chiefs, upheld by the indigénat, and enforced by the powerful force publique – French colonial troops, and the commandement indigène – an indigenous auxiliary police force with 43 Estimates provided by Georges Viers, “Le cacao dans le monde,” Cahiers d’outre-mer 6, no. 24 (1953): 297–351. 42 The Beti comprise one ethnic grouping of the larger ethno-regional population known as the Beti-Pahouin. The background of the Beti-Pahouin (Beti) populations is one of amalgamated socio-linguistic groups whose local allegiances and common economic interests allowed for the formation of a sizable socio-political group in Cameroon throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Beti include among them the sub-ethnic groups of the Ewondo, Bané, Fang, Mbida-Mbane, Mvog-Nyenge, Eton, and Manguissa. The Eton are further subdivided into the Eton-Beti, Eton-Beloua, and Beloua-Eton. During the nineteenth century, the Ewondo, Eton, Bané, Bulu, and Fang peoples inhabited the region between central Cameron, northern Gabon, and western Congo. These peoples had common linguistic and cultural characteristics, and with the arrival of European imperial interests, these populations developed similar reactions to economic opportunities, notably cocoa farming. See André Amougou, Chef du département et doyen Bané (Traduction par interprète auxiliaire, André Foe Amougo, (Bané)), La Formation de la race Bané, no. 4 (Yaoundé: Imprimerie Coulomma, 1937); Pierre Alexandre and Jacques Binet, Le groupe dit pahouin (Fang, Boulou, Beti) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958); Victor Julius Ngoh, History of Cameroon Since 1800 (Limbé, Cameroon: Pressbook, Ltd 1996) as well as Ethnicité, identités et citoyenneté en Afrique Centrale (Yaoundé, Cameroun: Presses de l’UCAC, 2002). Mbembe, La Naissance Du Maquis Dans Le Sud-Cameroun, 1920–1960, 36. Z01 WalkS book A.indb 14 16/04/2018 15:22 MARRIAGE AT THE NEXUS OF FAITH, POWER, & FAMILY 15 considerable freedom to carry out their orders.44 The capacity of African chiefs to control the means of violence in order to marshal tens of thousands of laborers across the territory for road, rail, bridge, and port construction was both stunning and unrecognizable to African societies in the southern forest zones. Before European colonization, leaders of nearly all ethno-regional groups of the southern forest region – including, among others, the major Beti, Bassa, Bulu groups and other Pahouin and non-Pahouin ethno-regional societies of the southern forests such as the Maka and Gbaya of eastern Cameroon and the Douala, Malimba, Bakweri, Banyang, and Balundu of coastal and southwest Cameroon – did not exhibit a centralized political leadership and were marked by their acephalous segmentary lineages, which lacked strong hierarchical organization.45 Lineage heads exercised authority strictly within a family 44 45 The French administration promulgated a number of laws organizing labor in the territory, most of which conformed to laws passed throughout French West and French Equatorial Africa. See Code du travail en A.O.F., arrêté général du 29 mars 1926; la convention sur le travail forcé de 1930; la convention sur le recrutement des travailleurs indigènes de 1936; la convention sur les contrats de travail à long terme de 1939; la convention sur les sanctions pénales de 1939. Notably, nearly every labor code passed included a chapter on the “question de la liberté du travail” which allowed for forced labor. Even the revised labor code passed in 1947 after World War II included the statement: “The right to requisition laborers during peacetime, notably in cases of public calamities and urgent work that concerns the health of populations, will be regulated by decrees directed by the minister of Overseas France…” chapitre 2bis, Code du Travail d’Outre-Mer date du 18 octobre 1947 (code Moutet). See Jacqueline Delange, “La Discussion Parlementaire Sur Le Code Du Travail En Afrique Noire,” Présence Africaine, no. 13 (1952): 377–400. For more on the history of policing in the French colonies, see Emmanuel Blanchard and Joël Glassman, “Le Maintien de l’ordre Dans l’empire Français : Une Historiographie Émergent,” in Maintenir l’ordre Colonial. Afrique et Madagascar, XIXe-XXe Siècles, ed. Jean-Pierre Bat and Nicolas Courtin, Histoire (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012), 11–41; Emmanuel Blanchard, Quentin Deluermoz, and Joël Glassman, “La Professionnalisation Policière En Situation Coloniale : Détour Conceptuel et Explorations Historiographiques,” Crime, Histoire & Sociétés 15 (2011): 33–53. ANC APA 11643 Gouverneur-Général van Vollenhoven, Journal Officiel de l’AOF, 1917, 467 mentions this. This has also been thoroughly chronicled by Kpwang K. Robert and Samah Tondji Walters, “Invention of Tradition: Chieftaincy, Adaptation and Change in the Forest Region of Cameroon,” in La Cheffrie “Traditionnelle” Dans Les Socitétés de La Grande Zone Forestière Du Sud-Cameroun (1850–2010), ed. Kpwang K. Robert (Paris et Cameroun: L’Harmattan, 2011), 71–84; Paul-Gérard Pougoué, Ethnicité, identités et citoyenneté en Afrique centrale (Yaoundé, Cameroon: Presses Universitaires de l’Université catholique d’Afrique Centrale, 2002); Victor Julius Ngoh, History of Cameroon since 1800 (Limbé, Cameroon: Presbook, 1996); Pierre Alexandre and Jacques Binet, Le Groupe Dit Pahouin (Fang-Boulou-Beti) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958); Peter Geschiere, Village Communities and the State: Changing Z01 WalkS book A.indb 15 16/04/2018 15:22 16 INTRODUCTION or lineage, and worked with other lineage heads or elders to manage larger affiliated groups.46 Bulu author Jean Louis Ndjemba Medou describes Bulu society before the European encounter as marked by a complete lack of extrafamilial authority.47 Beti segmentary societies had no institutionalized elite or centralized chieftaincies, and family fathers or village elders (“founders”) had the greatest degree of independence and autonomy relative to those of lower status.48 Eastern Cameroon’s Maka, Mkako, and Gbaya peoples were similarly patrilineal, patrilocal societies in which elders displayed varying degrees of control over youth and marriageable women.49 Early French reports on the Maka noted, “local communities are small and they are not used to paying tribute to local authorities.”50 Other societies in this region likewise maintained relatively diffuse leadership systems, which promoted elders, groups of lineage heads, and fathers as community leaders capable of authentically expressing communal loyalties and desires.51 46 47 48 49 50 51 Relations among the Maka of South-Eastern Cameroon since the Colonial Conquest (London and Boston, MA: Kegan Paul International, 1982); Peter Geschiere, “Chiefs and Colonial Rule in Cameroon: Inventing Chieftaincy, French and British Style,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 63, no. 2 (1993); Ralph A. Austen and Jonathan Derrick, Middlemen of the Cameroons Rivers: The Duala and Their Hinterland, c.1600–c.1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 40–3. Peter Geschiere provides the most thoroughly nuanced discussion of kinship-based socio-political organization in Cameroon’s southern forest region and describes the Maka society before colonial conquest as based on autonomous patrilineages who formed villages of fewer than one hundred people, and were “even more segmentary” than the Beti, their western neighbors, as there was “no trace of any central authority between the villages.” The Beti by contrast expressed greater cooperation between lineages and supported the authority of lineage heads over a larger scale of descendants, women, and slaves or clients. See Peter Geschiere, “Slavery and Kinship among the Maka (Cameroon, Eastern Province),” Paideuma 41 (1995): 207–25. Jean Louis Ndjemba Medou, Nnanga Kon (Yaoundé: Edition Sopecam, 1989). Laburthe-Tolra, Les Seigneurs de La Forêt : Essai Sur Le Passé Historique, l’organisation Sociale et Les Norms Éthiques Des Anciens Béti Du Cameroun, 356–8. Elisabeth Copet-Rougier, “Parenté et Rapports de Productions Chez Les Mkako,” L’Ethnographie 121, no. 79 (1979): 7–39; Copet-Rougier, “Étude de La Transformation Du Mariage Chez Les Mkako Du Cameroun”; Geschiere, Village Communities and the State, 258–60. ANC APA 11643 Rapport administratif, Situation politique et Justice, May 1920. Alexandre and Binet, Le Groupe Dit Pahouin (Fang-Boulou-Beti); Barnabé Bilongo, Les Pahouins Du Sud-Cameroun : Inventaires Bibliographiques, Connaissance Des Fang, Ntoumou, Muaé, Boulou, Beti (Menguissa, Eton, Muëlë, Bënë et Ewondo) et Du Groupe Dit Sanaga (Yaoundé, Cameroon: Imprimerie Saint-Paul, 1974); Moise Ateba Ngoa, “Histoire de La Traduction et de l’interpretation En Pays Beti: De La Période Coloniale à Nos Jours,” in Perspectives on Translation and Interpretation in Cameroon, ed. Emmanuel Nges Chia, Joseph Che Suh, and Alexandre Ndeffo Tene Z01 WalkS book A.indb 16 16/04/2018 15:22 MARRIAGE AT THE NEXUS OF FAITH, POWER, & FAMILY 17 Despite the fact that indigenous organizational forms in southern Cameroon did not recognize politically dominating command structures such as chieftaincy or kingship, village leaders and elders aggressively pursued pathways to accumulation through marriage and patronage. The economic and political inequality that resulted in precolonial times – as more productive proprietors amassed large units of wives, children, and junior and dependent men – was managed through negotiations, kin relations, and generational shifts within the minor lineage (mvog in Beti), extended household (boane mpanze in Maka), or village.52 While the lineage or village leader acquired wealth through the labor of wives, children, and low-status men, the imparity that resulted was regulated by the conditional loyalty of his kin and servants.53 As Bertrand Lembezat summarized, “the family is a man’s only valuable.”54 Diffuse leadership still supported social inequality, but, wives and dependants attained status by participation in wealth accumulation, expected redistribution, and could refuse to defend and serve the high-status elder if members of the group became unsatisfied. As Jennifer Johnson-Hanks has so carefully uncovered, women and junior men “strategically consented” to engage in a 52 53 54 (Bamenda, Cameroon: Langaa RPCIG and African Books Collective, 2009); LaburtheTolra, Les Seigneurs de La Forêt: Essai Sur Le Passé Historique, l’organisation Sociale et Les Norms Éthiques Des Anciens Béti Du Cameroun; Jacques Fulbert Owono, Pauvreté ou paupérisation en Afrique: une étude exegético-ethique de la pauvreté chez les Beti-Fang du Cameroun (Bamberg, Germany: University of Bamberg Press, 2011). The Muslim Fulbé tribes of the northern regions and the Chad Basin who pledged allegiance to powerful lamidat, as well as the close-knit political hierarchies of the Bamileke of the highland plateau region, provide alternatives to this organizational structure in Cameroon’s southern forest zone. Daniel Abwa, “The French Administrative System in the Lamidate of Ngaoundéré,” in Introduction to the History of Cameroon: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Martin Njeuma (London: Macmillan, 1989), 137–69; Nicolas Argenti, The Intestines of the State: Youth, Violence, and Belated Histories in the Cameroon Grassfields (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Among the Beti, who accumulated wives and clients on a much larger scale than their Maka, Gbaya, or Kaka neighbors to the east, wealthy lineage heads were known as nukukuma. Philippe Laburthe-Tolra, Initiations et Sociétés Secrètes Au Cameroun: Les Mystères de La Nuit : Essai Sur La Religion Beti, Volume 1 (Paris: Karthala, 1985), 8. See also Geschiere, “Slavery and Kinship among the Maka (Cameroon, Eastern Province).” Laburthe-Tolra, Les Seigneurs de La Forêt: Essai Sur Le Passé Historique, l’organisation Sociale et Les Norms Éthiques Des Anciens Béti Du Cameroun, 374; Alain Leplaideur, “Vie et survie domestique en zone forestière camerounaise : la reproduction simple estelle assurée,” in Le Risque en agriculture, ed. Michel Eldin and Pierre Milleville (Paris: Editions de l’ORSTOM, 1989), 280–1. Bertrand Lembezat, Le Cameroun (Paris: Editions Maritimes et Coloniales, 1954), 54. Z01 WalkS book A.indb 17 16/04/2018 15:22 18 INTRODUCTION system of “wealth in people” in which they were subordinate so long as they understood it also contained pathways to their own personal advancement.55 Perceiving the need for more forceful and less transactional authority, French officials pursued a strategy of instituting a strong African chieftaincy backed by French law and police powers, which would allow for the “profound transformation” of the territory.56As these societies had not previously been organized through centralized polities, African government associates in the southern forest region during French administration were mostly unrecognizable principals – either elders who extended their powers, ambitious junior men who usurped authority, or men with preexisting ties to prestige but little power.57 With the colonial bureaucracy subsidizing concessionary investments, financial interests superseded any “civilizational” initiatives or humanitarian pledges made to the League of Nations, and thus African chiefs in the southern forests were commissioned to recruit thousands of laborers to remove rock and earth, fell trees, lay stone and rails, build docks along rivers, haul mud and lumber, and perform myriad other punishing tasks under the surveillance of French guards and African police armed with chicottes.58 Administration chiefs compelled men, women, and children to labor on transit lines for months or entire seasons, and often either conscripted remaining villagers to work their own agricultural enterprises or married numerous wives to manage their households and farmsteads.59 For commoner men in the southern zone 55 56 57 58 59 Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, Uncertain Honor: Modern Motherhood in an African Crisis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 30. ANOM Affaires Politiques (hereafter AFFPOL) 615/1 La Haute Conférence de la Paix au Cameroun, 18 août 1919. The history of the transformation of chieftaincy in societies in Cameroon’s southern regions, from the western coasts to the eastern boundaries of Congo, typically highlights the extortive tendencies of the African agents of the administration; see Philippe Laburthe-Tolra, “Charles Atangana,” in Les Africains, ed. Charles André Julien (Paris: Jaguar, 1977), 109–41; Philip Burnham, “‘Regroupement’ and Mobile Societies: Two Cameroon Cases,” Journal of African History 15, no. 4 (1975): 577–94. Robert and Walters, “Invention of Tradition: Chieftaincy, Adaptation and Change in the Forest Region of Cameroon.” A chicotte is a long knotted whip with a wooden handle used as a punishment in French Equatorial Africa, Belgian Congo and Portuguese Africa. The enormity (and brutality) of France’s infrastructure programs in Cameroon, including roadways, railways, ports, and bridges, is captured in France’s reports to the League of Nations. See ANOM Travaux Publiques (hereafter TP) Série 1 420/11, Rapport à la Société des Nations, Années 1931, 1934, and 1935. Achille Mbembe and Philippe Laburthe-Tolra have both painstakingly chronicled the extent of the use of forced labor by the French colonial government in Cameroon. Mbembe, La Naissance Du Maquis Dans Le Sud-Cameroun, 1920–1960, 59–88; Laburthe-Tolra, Vers La Lumiere? Ou, Le Désir d’Ariel: A Propos Des Beti Z01 WalkS book A.indb 18 16/04/2018 15:22 MARRIAGE AT THE NEXUS OF FAITH, POWER, & FAMILY 19 who were able to control landed property and capture the potential of the new market economy, a wife and any children she bore were an operational necessity, a marker of socio-economic prestige, and, increasingly, a rare and costly household component as administration-appointed chiefs often seized greater power over women and their offspring and prevented higher numbers of men from marrying.60 What this book will demonstrate is that southern Cameroon’s forest societies’ negotiable kin and lineage hierarchies that marked the precolonial era were soon captive to inflexible centralized command structures under German, and later French colonial rule. In response to this, African Christian men enacted reform strategies that rejected the rigid exclusivity and possessorship of the colonial chieftaincy system that restricted commoner men’s prospects for advancement and pursued a revised patriarchal vision with priveleges over a wife and children evenly distributed among baptized believers. Women’s agency and desires within this remodeled patriarchy were frequently suppressed, as many of this book’s later chapters will reveal. Like junior men, women had considerable negotiating power in precolonial segmentary societies, and their connections to powerful patrons could result in access to land, wealth, or advantage.61 While Christian rhetoric emanating from foreign missionaries frequently espoused female “emancipation” through monogamous 60 61 Du Cameroun: Sociologie de La Conversion, 360–91. Several works by Cameroonian scholars have also focused on the synergies between the French regime of forced labor or prestation and the transformation of chieftaincy systems among the Beti and Bulu societies, including Léopold-François Eze, “Le Commandement Indigène de La Région Du Nyong et Sanaga, Sud-Cameroun, de 1916 à 1945” (Université de Paris I, 1975); Essama Philippe-Roger, “Evolution de La Cheffrie Traditionnelle En Pays Bëti” (1966); Kpwang K. Robert, “La Résistance Des Ekang Du Sud-Cameroun Face Aux Chefs Supérieurs Imposés Par l’administration Coloniale Française: De l’avènement Des ‘Présidents Claniques’ à La Création de l’Efulameoñ (1920–1948),” in La Cheffrie “Traditionnelle” Dans Les Socitétés de La Grande Zone Forestière Du Sud-Cameroun (1850–2010) (Paris et Cameroun: L’Harmattan, 2011), 235–55. Jane Guyer is perhaps the most prolific writer on economic change and matrimony in Cameroonian societies. See Jane I. Guyer, “Head Tax, Social Structure and Rural Incomes in Cameroun, 1922–37,” Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines XX, no. 3 (1980): 305–29; Jane I. Guyer and Samuel M. Eno Belinga, “Wealth in People as Wealth in Knowledge: Accumulation and Composition in Equatorial Africa,” Journal of African History 36 (1995): 91–120; Jane I. Guyer, “Indigenous Currencies and the History of Marriage Payments: A Case Study from Cameroon,” Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines 26, no. 104 (1986): 577–610. Laburthe-Tolra, Les Seigneurs de La Forêt: Essai Sur Le Passé Historique, l’organisation Sociale et Les Norms Éthiques Des Anciens Béti Du Cameroun, 243–7. Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg discusses this phenomenon in the Grassfields area among the smaller, centralized chieftaincies of the Bamileke. See Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg, Z01 WalkS book A.indb 19 16/04/2018 15:22 20 INTRODUCTION marriage, on the ground, evangelism, catechism, and the mobilization of male believers centered on implementing new marital practices that intercepted or limited women’s autonomy in marriage as part of a more deliberate strategy to check the power of acquisitive elites.62 Women’s autonomy was further limited by Christian men’s collaborative dynamism in the second half of the interwar period when they regained influence and warrant over wealth and opportunity. However, there was remarkable continuity and even entrenchment of precolonial engrossment with female fertility among southern Cameroon’s forest societies. Pierre Alexandre and Jacques Binet, along with Philippe LaburtheTolra all emphasize longstanding approaches to marriage in the southern forest zone as defined by their focus on sexuality and reproduction as a part of the male and female life course. What is unique to the period of widespread Christian conversion is how Christian men socialized strategies of acquiring access to females and their reproductive capacity and how they cooperated to make marriage an immutable commitment endorsed by God, rather than a system of reciprocities that accommodated changing circumstances with flexible adjustments. Christianity and Social Change in the Equatorial Forests During the decades between the two World Wars, Cameroon’s southern forest region not only experienced some of the most dramatic political and economic discontinuities, it was also a unique space in which to observe the atmosphere of international colonialism fostered by the League of Nations, which allowed for greater exposure to Christian missions than in France’s other territories.63 After the Great War, the French territorial government in Cameroon became subordinate to the supervisory framework of the Permanent Mandates Commission, and was thus legally bound by the 1919 Treaty of Saint-Germain- 62 63 Plundered Kitchens, Empty Wombs (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999). See Laburthe-Tolra, Initiations et Sociétés Secrètes Au Cameroun: Les Mystères de La Nuit : Essai Sur La Religion Beti, Volume 1, 134–47; Alexandre and Binet, Le Groupe Dit Pahouin (Fang-Boulou-Beti), 35–78. The mandates were created as part of the Treaty of Versailles as a new category in colonial administrative law. The League of Nations envisioned three classes of mandates: Class A mandates in the Middle East were given “provisional recognition” of their political independence while Class B and C mandates in Africa and the Pacific were to be managed as colonial holdings. See René Costedoat, L’effort Français Au Cameroun, Le Mandat Français et La Réorganisation Des Territoires Du Cameroun (Paris: Editions Larose, 1930); Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (New York: Penguin, 2012), 70–80. Z01 WalkS book A.indb 20 16/04/2018 15:22 MARRIAGE AT THE NEXUS OF FAITH, POWER, & FAMILY 21 en-Laye to accept assistance from all religious institutions “to guide native populations towards progress and civilization.”64 As a result, a plentiful range of international missionary societies expanded their influence in the early decades of the French mandate, reopening former German mission stations in the more accessible coastal and forest areas and growing the ranks of African mission auxiliaries. Even before the establishment of the Mandates Commission that divided the former German Kamerun into French and British mandate territories in 1922, African evangelists from Nigeria and Cameroon circulated Protestant and Catholic prayer books, hymnals, scripture passages, and newsletters during and after the European military campaigns in the Yaoundé, Douala, and Victoria regions starting in 1914.65 The sole American mission, the Presbyterian Mission of the U.S.A., had been active in coastal and southern Cameroon since 1832, and, unlike the German Basel and Pallottine missions, was allowed to remain in the territory during the French military occupation. Following the war, the French orders of the Society of Jesus, the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, and Priests of the Sacred Heart of Saint Quentin, along with the French Protestant Mission (which included the French Evangelical Lutheran Church, the Fraternal Lutheran Church, the Union of Baptist Churches, and the Paris Society of Evangelical Missions), and the Native Baptist Church all established or extended their influence with a particularly marked presence in the coastal, western, and southern forest zones of the new mandate territory. Consequently, a vibrant association of missionary networks and their affiliated charities, hospitals, and medical organizations expanded their influence alongside the French administration to “maintain public order and morals” in the first decade of mandate rule.66 The religious and political influence of these sub-state agents grew considerably in the interwar period. In the forest zone and its neighboring coastal and highland plateau regions, Africans working with the Catholic Spiritan and American Presbyterian Missions had the broadest territorial ranges, operating throughout southern Cameroon between the coast and the dense eastern forests. Those who were connected with the French Society of the Sacred Heart and the Fraternal Lutheran Churches also ventured into Cameroon’s northern 64 65 66 See also Acte de Londres (1922) circumscribing France’s authority over Cameroon, ANOM AFFPOL 615/1. Laburthe-Tolra, Vers La Lumiere? Ou, Le Désir d’Ariel: A Propos Des Beti Du Cameroun: Sociologie de La Conversion, 45–60. Article 22, Covenant of the League of Nations, Including Amendments adopted to December, 1924; Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye of 1919, frequently cited in administrative reports, “Affaires religieuses,” ANOM AFFPOL 3349/2; ACSSP 2J1.7a4 construction des églises et monastères. Z01 WalkS book A.indb 21 16/04/2018 15:22 22 INTRODUCTION regions where Islam was predominant. Baptist, Lutheran Evangelical, and other Protestant societies remained mostly in coastal regions as well as the western southern forest zone until the late 1950s when the independent Council of Baptist and Evangelical Churches of Cameroon (CEBEC) was formed and mission activity spread farther into the east.67 African catechists from the Wouri river and coastal regions and those catechists from western Cameroon became the most prominent teachers of Baptist theology and coordinated with Presbyterian catechists and teachers to transmit Reformed Christianity farther south and east.68 African-led evangelism in the southern forest zone both shaped and was shaped by population relocation and reorganization as a result of colonial infrastructure projects and the French régime du travail. Jan Vansina was perhaps the first to provide a thorough analysis of the Central African forest zone, and rightly perceived that changes to the physical environment and cultural patterns considerably disturbed human relationships.69 Vansina’s insights into the “equatorial tradition,” or the dynamic nature of precolonial social and legal relations, led him to believe that as African kinship, intermarriage, and decentralized authority structures mutated with incorporation into French colonial systems, they were “prevented … from inventing new structures to cope…”70 The “irreversible crisis” of Africans’ cognitive inadaptability to “unforeseen and hitherto unimaginable events of the colonial conquest,” Vansina claimed, spelled the death of the equatorial tradition in the 1920s.71 Celebrated novelist Mongo Beti depicted societies in his Cameroonian pays natal experiencing this painful cultural decline in the novels, Le Roi miraculé, Mission terminée, and Le pauvre Christ de Bomba. In these works, only ontological insecurity, alienation, passive dependence, and confusion result from missionary Christianity and constant subordination.72 These interpretations 67 68 69 70 71 72 Messina and Slageren, Histoire Du Christianisme Au Cameroun, 65–70. The American Presbyterian Mission also received funding from the French Protestant Mission via French government funds for the operation of mission schools. SMEP/ DEFAP EEC Inventaire du Fonds Brutsch (hereafter FB) 2/2, EEC Divers, vie des eglises I; PHS West Africa Mission, Mission Meeting Minutes 1952, Elat, July–August 1952. Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests. Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa. Vansina, 247. Vansina, 247. Mongo Beti, Mission Terminée (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1957); Mongo Beti, Le Roi miraculé; chronique des Essazam, roman (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, Correa, 1958); Mongo Beti, Le pauvre Christ de Bomba (Paris: Presence africaine, 1976). See also Mohamed Aït-Aarab, Mongo Beti. Un écrivain engagé (Paris: Karthala, 2013). While noting Beti’s formidable contributions to contemporary understandings of how African Z01 WalkS book A.indb 22 16/04/2018 15:22 MARRIAGE AT THE NEXUS OF FAITH, POWER, & FAMILY 23 leave little room for recognizing adaptation, resistance, or accommodation among these dynamic societies.73 In her examination of equatorial African histories, Florence Bernault contrasted Vansina’s scholarly approach with that of Jean-François Bayart, who has argued for the political and cultural continuity of equatorial peoples from the precolonial era through the late twentieth century.74 Bayart provides evidence for the endurance of the “capacity of the lineage” in contemporary state politics, pointing to vestigal kin and family ties at work in what he terms “local popular modes of political action.”75 Likewise, Christopher Gray demonstrated that despite the ruptures of colonialism, equatorial communities in colonial Gabon retained their historic “cognitive map” of esoteric knowledge and spiritual systems to maintain community resiliency.76 Bayart and Gray help us to more carefully perceive the continuance of the competitive and cooperative equatorial lineage structure in expressions of political power throughout history, and Gray convinces us of its strength in preserving the religious mysteries of the precolonial past. 77 Nevertheless, there remain significant distinctions 73 74 75 76 77 society experienced colonialism in Cameroon, this book challenges late twentieth-century Western academic epistemologies that have shaped what constitutes “postcolonial literature” to revisit African voices that discuss colonial experiences with Christianity in distinct and individualist terms. This book considers the insights provided in novels by Cameroonian authors Joseph Owono and Marie-Claire Matip – overlooked in postcolonial literary studies – to discern cultural change as experienced by Cameroon’s devout Christians. See Joseph Owono, Tante Bella: Roman d’aujourd’hui et de Demain (Yaoundé: Librairie “Au Messager,” 1959); Marie-Claire Matip, Ngonda (Paris: Bibliothèque du Jeune Africain, 1958). David Robinson provides an alternative to interpreting dramatic change as either “death” or “continuation” in Muslim West Africa and demonstrates the importance of negotiated relations wherein some autonomy is preserved while some realms of power are ceded. See David Robinson, Paths of Accommodation: Muslim Societies and French Colonial Authorities in Senegal and Mauritania, 1880–1920, 1 edition (Athens, OH and Oxford: Ohio University Press, 2000). Florence Bernault, Démocraties Ambigües En Afrique Centrale, Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon: 1940–1965 (Paris: Karthala, 1996), 11–12. Jean-François Bayart, “Civil Society in Africa,” in Political Domination in Africa: Reflections on the Limits of Power, ed. Patrick Chabal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 109–25. Christopher J. Gray, Colonial Rule and Crisis in Equatorial Africa: Southern Gabon, c. 1850–1940 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002). See also Jean-François Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly (London and New York: Longman Group, 1993); Jean-François Bayart, L’Etat Au Cameroun (Paris: Presses de la fondation nationale de science politique, 1985). For the Church as a political agent in Cameroon, see Jean-François Bayart, “Les Rapports Entre Les Églises et l’État Du Cameroun de 1958 à 1971,” Revue Française d’Etudes Politiques Africaines 80 (1972): 79–104; Jean-François Bayart, “Les Eglises Chrétiennes et La Politique Du Z01 WalkS book A.indb 23 16/04/2018 15:22 24 INTRODUCTION between equatorial societies “then” and “now.”78 Incontrovertibly, increasing numbers of Africans professed Christianity throughout the interwar period in Cameroon, and the African Catholic population alone grew to more than 500,000 by the end of French rule.79 African Protestants, largely organized by the mission schools affiliated with the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society (SMEP), the American Presbyterian Mission, and the Native Baptist Church, comprised a population of roughly 300,000 in 1960.80 Christian commitments did not only affect marriage, sexual reproduction, the family economy, and social life, but also what Mbembe terms “symbolic coercion” – how culture produces definitions in the world and how a system of behaviors can come to reflect an understanding of truth.81 Throughout the 78 79 80 81 Ventre: Le Partage Du gâteau Ecclésial in L’argent de Dieu.,” Politique Africaine, no. 35 (1989): 3–26; Bayart, “Civil Society in Africa.” This book emphasizes rupture as well as endurance in assessing the process of Christian conversion. There are many critiques of “continuity thinking” in studies of Christianity and Christianization. Joel Robbins forcefully argued that anthropologists have diminished the significance of religious and cultural change in the modern era, to the detriment of adequately explaining ruptures. Kim Bowes similarly forwards that in studies of Antiquity, historians “assume a tacit teleology” whereby longstanding customs and even worldviews endure throughout profound transformations in political, religious, or social structures such as the broad-scale conversion of inhabitants of the Roman Empire to Christianity. Peter Brown states that these kinds of assumptions “fail to do justice to the elements of novelty that … accompanied the rise of Christianity.” Joel Robbins, “Continuity Thinking and the Problem of Christian Culture: Belief, Time, and the Anthropology of Christianity,” Current Anthropology 48, no. 1 (2007): 5–38; Kim Bowes, Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity, 1 edition (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 83. This number includes baptized Catholics and catechumens. In 1960, the Yaoundé diocese counted over 300,000 African Catholics and 91,000 catechumens. The Douala diocese included roughly 200,000 baptized believers. R.P. Bouchaud, “Cameroun: Eglise et Communisme,” Spiritains: Missions Des Peres Du St. Esprit 31, no. 1 (March 1958); Bengt Sundkler & Christopher Steed, A History of the Church in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 756. Kengne Pokam, Les eglises chrétiennes face à la montée du nationalisme camerounais (Paris: l’Harmattan, 1987), 59–60; Roger Dussercle, Du Kilima-Ndjaro au Cameroun, Monseigneur F.X. Vogt (1870–1943) (Paris: Éditions du Vieux Colombier, 1954), 122; and Jean-Paul Messina, “Contribution des Camerounais à l’expansion de l’eglise catholique. Cas des populations du sud-Cameroun 1890–1961,” Thèse presentée pour l’obtention du Doctorat du 3eme cycle d’histoire sous la direction du Professeur Mveng, Université de Yaoundé, 1988, pg. 194. Achille Mbembe, Afriques Indociles : Christianisme, Pouvoir, et État en Société Postcoloniale (Paris: Karthala, 1988), 26. Z01 WalkS book A.indb 24 16/04/2018 15:22 MARRIAGE AT THE NEXUS OF FAITH, POWER, & FAMILY 25 interwar years in Cameroon, there was a conversion of men and of women, conversions in villages, in cities, of the wealthy, and of the poor. Privileged church hierarchies incorporated young converts, which challenged generational cleavages of status. Through all this, the Christian Churches built a diverse set of clients, but with a similar set of strategies for reconstituting symbolic understandings, ritual life, and interpersonal responsibilities and rights.82 The African Catholic clergy grew more slowly than the ranks of African Protestant pastors in Cameroon, and both Churches were assisted by far more numerous and locally active cadres of catechists, evangelists, church elders, nuns, deaconesses, and friars, who often recruited their brothers, cousins, nephews, and other kin to serve alongside them. While ordained African Catholic priests could not marry and have children, they emerged in the late interwar period as a formidable influence in rural parishes and the Church hierarchy, in large part because of their continued influence in lineage and village affairs. By the later interwar period in 1937, roughly 5,000 African Catholic catechists coordinated catechism, charitable works, and mutual aid with eight African priests, nineteen African friars, and six African nuns. In that year they arranged and assisted in over 26,000 baptisms and 5,000 Catholic marriages.83 The energy present in the religious life of close-knit lineage societies prompted hundreds of young African men to join seminaries after being inspired or encouraged by their cousins, brothers, or uncles, and by the end of World War II, Cameroon had roughly three dozen indigenous Catholic priests and nearly one hundred pastors of Protestant denominations, often assigned to multiple parishes to manage rapidly growing congregations.84 Oral interviews with Catholic priests and friars in Cameroon revealed to me that the intimacies between siblings, uncles and nephews, grandparents and grandchildren, and other relations only strengthened as Africans molded the lineage structure to suit the Christian Churches as their new institutional homes. Overall, African men in Cameroon had considerable success in ascending the ranks of various clerical and lay ecclesiastical hierarchies. They even forced institutions like the Catholic Church to worry about “ruptures” between 82 83 84 Mbembe, 32. ACSSp. 2J1.8.a1 L’Effort Catholique Français au Cameroun, les Peres du Saint-Esprit: Vicariats apostoliques de Yaoundé et Douala, Rapport 1937. Ngongo, Histoire des forces religieuses au Cameroun. In conducting oral interviews, I learned that Mgr. Athanase Bala, former bishop of Bafia, is the cousin of another famous bishop, Mgr. Paul Etoga, former bishop of Mbalmayo and the first African bishop to serve in Cameroon. Many other elite clergymen also have a relative in the ranks of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Interview with Athanase Bala, CSSp., Bishop emeritus of Bafia, Cameroon, on July 8, 2015, Seminaire des Missions, Congrégation du Saint-Esprit, Chevilly Larue, France. Z01 WalkS book A.indb 25 16/04/2018 15:22 26 INTRODUCTION the local and foreign clergies after African priests assumed greater levels of influence and popularity among the populace in the late 1930s, challenging the authority of European bishops and mission leaders.85 African pastors in French Protestant missions also became revered and powerful authorities in their own right, and some were notorious for snubbing European clergymen who visited their churches by leaving prominent foreigners to participate in – rather than direct – rites and liturgies.86 As African men gained legitimacy as authorities on theological and spiritual issues and made their presence known throughout the territory, they gained devoted followings and provided ideological justification for deciding actions such as baptism, betrothal, marriage, or divorce. In leading and adapting Christian agendas, African lay and ecclesiastical leaders assumed the legitimacy of foreign institutions while displacing the supremacy of their institutional leaders, becoming what the Beti termed ntang-evindi, a white man with black skin.87 African evangelists’ management of Church institutions and their frequent noncompliance with colonial laws made them wildly popular among African congregations but deeply despised by French colonial officials. Having gained both eminence and a means of communication with their publics through meetings, catechism, administering sacraments, and the confessional press, Christian leaders initiated new strategies that exploited the destructive outcomes of French political decentralization in order to gain followers. Converts eagerly sought answers to the growing conflicts in families and communities that resulted from forced labor conscription and economic injustice that wrought bridewealth inflation, impoverishment, and spouselessness. Religious communities’ solutions often deployed Christian social teachings and in particular, doctrinal teachings on monogramous marriage, in their efforts to restore social equilibrium and receive spiritual grace. In every decade, indigenous authorities in the Churches inaugurated new kinds of individual and collective action, and shaped social forms and moral codes to the extent that they recreated the institution of marriage and traditions of family-building among their followers, thus enacting strategies that were arguably more transformative than those of the colonial regime. 85 86 87 ACSSp. 2J1.13.b3 Lettre de Rome, Sigismondi et R.P. Murphy 2710/61, 15 juin 1960. André Privat was particularly outraged by the controlling leadership of Cameroonian Pastor Paul Jocky of the Evangelical Church. By contrast, he found the Baptist churches more welcoming of European pastors’ presence and mentorship. André Privat, Coup de coeur pour l’Afrique: 1956–1957 (Geneva: Editions du Pressoir de Montalègre, 1992), 246. Jean-Paul Messina, “Contribution Des Camerounais à l’expansion de l’Église Catholique Le Cas Des Populations Du Sud-Cameroun, 1890–1961” (Université de Yaoundé, 1988), 263. Z01 WalkS book A.indb 26 16/04/2018 15:22 MARRIAGE AT THE NEXUS OF FAITH, POWER, & FAMILY 27 In working to incorporate Christian marriage into the renovated traditions of Africans in the equatorial forest zone, African religious leaders mediated the cultural conflicts between social obligations, economic exigencies, political demands, and religious devotion – reconciling the population with their contemporary circumstances. Extending J.D.Y. Peel’s conclusions that devout Africans determined the course of conversion in their communities by strategically preserving and adapting indigenous ethical codes to reflect the Commandments, this book demonstrates how African Christian leaders – and particularly catechists, priests, and pastors – acted as buffers against radical change, but also intentionally propelled it.88 Influenced by sermons, texts, or more intimate encounters such as confessions or prayer groups, converts became more aware of the deleterious effects of longstanding local marriage practices at the same time as they were pressured by new forces like taxation, the indigènat, forced labor recruitment, arbitrary rule by chiefs, and fluctuating market prices for their crops.89 Rather than “clinging” to older cognitive systems or becoming “cultural schizophrenics” as Vansina concluded, Africans developed a dynamic series of responses with particular zeal during the period between the onset of World War I and the outbreak of World War II. In this way, new communitarian practices were produced through religious means, which gave rise to the presence of multiple lineage, transethnic, and cross-cultural confessional units, which this book will call Christian publics. These publics led their members toward new forms of personal piety, collective worship, and cultural expression, deriving their momentum from the desire to fully understand a new belief system that sought to alter African religious life and address the profound changes in relations between men and women in everyday life. The Framework of French Colonial Governance: Foreign and Local Power When the League of Nations officially recognized the French mandate territory of Cameroon’s integration into the legal framework of French Equatorial Africa in 1922, French military, administration, and concessionary officials had been policing, managing, and organizing export, tax, labor systems with 88 89 Peel, Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. Some of the best accounts of intimate social change in the colonial period in Cameroon include Guyer, “Head Tax, Social Structure and Rural Incomes in Cameroun, 1922–37”; Jane I Guyer, “Family and Farm in Southern Cameroon” ([Boston, MA]: Boston University, African Studies Center, 1984); Robert and Walters, “Invention of Tradition: Chieftaincy, Adaptation and Change in the Forest Region of Cameroon”; Andreas Eckert, “African Rural Entrepreneurs and Labor in the Cameroon Littoral,” Journal of African History, no. 40 (1999): 109–26. Z01 WalkS book A.indb 27 16/04/2018 15:22 28 INTRODUCTION their indigenous intermediaries for nearly seven years.90 Although the 1922 Original Mandate Accords’ idealistic rhetoric announced a “sacred trust of civilization” that would protect the “well-being and development” of subject peoples, this study supports Alice Conklin’s claim that the interwar years were “among the most coercive of the colonial period.”91 The postwar mandate was to transform Africa by increasing productivity and strengthening established hierarchies, which can be seen in 1915, when French commissioner Lorin disclosed his new vision for Cameroon after the war stating, “what is most important of all is establishing order … mandating work … The education of Africans now remains a question of policing them.92 In the first decade of French presence in Cameroon, French military and government officials were wary of disrupting productive industries or alienating potential collaborators.93 The heavy presence of Hamburg traders for several decades had influenced labor and political organization in the coastal and southern regions, and the fledgling French colonial administration between 1915 and 1920 acted to preserve the “continuity of ideas” initiated by German 90 91 92 93 The Treaty of Versailles granted France the greater part of the former German territory, with the smaller region bordering Nigeria granted to Great Britain (see Map 4). The League of Nations then conferred mandates to France and Great Britain to administer their respective territories in Cameroon as part of their empires. The French mandate was known as ‘Cameroun’ and the British territory was administered as two areas, Northern Cameroons and Southern Cameroons. See ANOM AFFPOL 615/1; Patrick Manning, Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa 1880–1985 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 79–100. Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930, 1 edition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 247. Convention de Saint Germain-en-Laye, 1919, see ANOM AFFPOL 3349/2. The Permanent Mandates Commission carried on day-to-day supervision under the authority of the League Council. David E. Gardinier, Cameroon: United Nations Challenge to French Policy (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 9–12. ANOM AFFPOL 615/1 “Cameroun 1915–1919,” Lettre du M.M. Lorin, “Les Colonies Allemandes et les Alliés en Afrique” au Délégué de Gouvernement Général de l’Afrique Equatoriale Française, Bureau d’Etudes Economiques, Décembre 1915, pg. 39. Documentary evidence suggests that French administrators hurriedly read manuals and reports on German modes of rule to swiftly gain an understanding of environmental conditions, the export potential of agricultural and forest products, and political strategy. Numerous copies of Karl Ritter’s Neu Kamerun of 1912 and Die Deutsch Schutzgebiete in Afrika und Der (Sudsea) of 1913 were ordered by French officials, along with Karl von der Hedyt’s Kolonialhandbuch and Alfred Zimmermann’s Geschichte der deutschen Kolonialpolitik. ANOM AGEFOM 956/3199 Lettre 134 de l’administration Française au Cameroun à Monsieur le Gouverneur Général de l’AEF à Brazzaville, 3 avril 1915; ANOM AFFPOL 612/4, “Cameroun et la Politique Allemande- Liquidation des biens Allemands au Togo et Cameroun.” See also ANOM AFFPOL 615/1 Rapport du Decembre 1923, “Les indigenes et la suite dans les idées.” Z01 WalkS book A.indb 28 16/04/2018 15:22 MARRIAGE AT THE NEXUS OF FAITH, POWER, & FAMILY 29 concessionary operations.94 Accordingly, in the years between military rule and official mandate recognition, the governance of everyday affairs was largely in the hands of private concessionary companies along with a small cadre of bureaucrats and representatives in Dakar, Brazzaville, and Paris.95 With few regional commanders and generally scarce personnel in the early years after the war, commissioner Lorin agreed that concessionaires would “establish French influence” in Cameroon by managing rural labor forces.96 Although concessionary companies’ influence was moderated in later decades, replaced by district governments, local representative bodies, and judicial systems, crude and despotic techniques of labor and population control remained in place until the Brazzaville reforms of 1944.97 According to laws passed in 1924 and 1927, “every adult of masculine sex” was obligated to furnish 10 days per annum of prestation (service) for “the accomplishment of works in the public interest.”98 While the 1924 law established a salary of 1 franc per day, its revision was more vague and mentioned women could be paid 94 95 96 97 98 ANOM AGEFOM 799/1857 Lettre de M.M. Lorin, Délégué de Gouvernement Général de l’Afrique Equatoriale Francaise Bureau d’Etudes Economiques, décembre 1915; See also ANOM AGEFOM 799/1857 Commerce Forestiere, 1917–1918. ANOM AGEFOM 799/1857 lettre de Dakar à M. le secretaire à Brazzaville, 31 août 1918. Representatives from the Compagnie Forestière de Sangha-Oubangui formed a close relationship with the transitional government and continued to lobby for lower tax and export levies and greater control of forest concessions throughout the mandate era. The Concessionary Oversight Board of French Equatorial Africa also worked alongside the French administration in Cameroon to oversee export development, and in 1919, the Board sent directives demanding the commissioner “organize labor” and “control the male population.” ANOM AGEFOM 956/3199 télégramme du Dakar, 31 août 1918 de Robinneau et Angoulvant des Compagnies Forestière de Sangha-Oubangi, à M. le Gov. Sec. Général à Brazzaville; ANOM AGEFOM 956/3199 lettres du M. Weber, Directeur des Forêts à Brazzaville, 1920; ANOM AGEFOM 956/3199 lettre de P. Boisson, AEF Contrôle des Concessions, à M. le Ministre des Colonies, “Etendue des concessions territoriales au Cameroun,” 13 déc. 1919. This proved to be a flawed assumption, as concessionaries invested little in economic development and were principally interested in short-term financial gain. Historians such as Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Victor T. LeVine, Daniel N. Posner, and JeanFrançois Bayart argue that this behavior in the early decades of the twentieth century established a pattern of economic behavior that continues in present-day Africa. See Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Le Congo au Temps des Grands Compagnies Concessionnaires, 1898–1930 (Paris and the Hague: Mouton and Co., 1972); Victor T. Le Vine, Poltiics in Francophone Africa, (London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004); Daniel N. Posner, Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly. Léon Kaptue, Cameroun: Travail et Main-d’Oeuvre Sous Le Régime Français, 1916– 1952 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1986), 30–44. ANOM TP Série 1 420/11, Arrêté du 1 juillet 1924; Arrêté du 9 mars 1927. Z01 WalkS book A.indb 29 16/04/2018 15:22 30 INTRODUCTION less than men, presumably because they only carried food and water for the laborers.99 As volunteers for prestation were rare, forced recruitments began in 1916 to complete sanitation work in towns, roadwork on forest paths, brush clearing for railroads and highways, waterway maintenance, and building construction. While the law technically excluded the elderly, women, children under sixteen, the sick, notables, chiefs, and police from forced labor, reports throughout the 1920s and 1930s (most frequently from missionary observers) detail the extensive use of women, children, and the elderly in manual labor and the general neglect of the 10-day service limit. In 1935, the Cameroon Public Works Commission recorded 1,795,750 days of forced labor by African workers.100 Another notable contribution of concessionary partnerships to the longterm governance of the mandate was the use of the indigénat code as a central element of the authority structure. Formally established in Cameroon in 1917, the indigénat provided disciplinary authority for district officers but was often broadly interpreted as administrative police powers and powers to impose fines, corporal punishment, and prison sentences on Africans and all colonized peoples without a legal or judicial appeal.101 The indigénat enumerated penalties for crimes including theft, assault, and refusal to pay taxes, as well as refusing to work in a labor camp, disobedience to a chief in the employment of the administration, or “disrespect” towards colonial representatives.102 Although French ministers in Paris and in French West Africa claimed the indigénat 99 100 101 102 The Annual Report of 1925 mentions that women performing work along the roads as “food porters and cooks” could be paid 0.30 francs per day. AFFPOL 2190/1 Rapport annuel du gouvernement français sur l’administration sous mandat des territoires du Cameroun pour l’année 1925. For reference, the total estimated population of all of Cameroon in 1931 was 2,223,802. ANOM TP Série 1 420/11, Rapport à la Société des Nations Année 1935, Services des Travaux Publics Chemins de Fer, Portes et Rades, 75. The 1931 census was reported in Rapport annuel adressée par le gouvernement français au conseil de la Société Des Nations sur l’administration sous mandat du territoire du Cameroun pour l’année 1931, 45. Decret du 14 mars 1917. A typical punishment was a period of fifteen days in jail or one hundred francs’ fine. Eckert, “African Rural Entrepreneurs and Labor in the Cameroon Littoral.” Monga and Eckert have written on the indigénat as a means of labor recruitment among coastal populations. Yvette Monga, “The Emergence of Duala Cocoa Planters under German Rule in Cameroon: A Case Study of Entrepreneurship,” in Cocoa Pioneer Fronts Since 1800: The Role of Smallholders, Planters, and Merchants, ed. William Gervase Clarence-Smith (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), 119–36.; Andreas Eckert, “Cocoa Farming in Cameroon, c.1914–1960,” in Cocoa Pioneer Fronts since 1800: The Role of Planters, Smallholders, and Merchants, ed. W. Gervase ClarenceSmith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 137–53. Z01 WalkS book A.indb 30 16/04/2018 15:22 MARRIAGE AT THE NEXUS OF FAITH, POWER, & FAMILY 31 was only an “early stage” system of legal authority necessary for “initiating” Africans to French law, calls for its repeal in 1924 were rejected, with officials stating that Africa was “still in an era of transition.”103 As a recently acquired territory, Cameroon embodied the “transitioning” colony until after World War II.104 Many studies have demonstrated that colonial administrations worked through a simulacra of customary regulation, but unlike previous narratives of the “invention of tradition” in colonial Africa, the history of interwar Cameroon illustrates that punishing colonial legal systems and improvised chiefdoms, were not, as Mamdani describes, “a world…from which there was no escape.”105 Precisely, new kinds of peer restraint and popular constraint emerged—distinct from any previous counterforces—in the form of African Christian principals and publics, whose most serious challenges included new religious agendas for cultural coherence and social reform that prioritized Christian marriage and family building, mutual aid and cooperative assistance, and individualized, household-based, masculine authority. Religious and Political Fluidity in Colonial Cameroon The efficacy of African Christians in circulating religious tenets that criticized the behaviors of both foreign and local potentates and their success in leading reform-minded activism was evident to a great many African and white observers of early-twentieth-century Cameroon.106 Most French officials saw African catechists as purely politically motivated, however, and routinely expressed 103 104 105 106 ANOM Fonds AEF, 1 H 74, 540/3, Rapport au President de la Republique Francaise, suivi d’un décret portant réglementation des sanctions de police administrative indigène en Afrique Occidentale, en Afrique Equatoriale, à Madagascar, et à la Cote des Somalis, Jean Fabry, 19 nov. 1924, No. 382. ANC APA 10634/A Décret de 13 avril 1921, Article 3 de Jules Carde. The Decrees of 30 November 1926 and 27 February 1929 expanded terms of the indigénat to protect various district officials, police officers, and security officials in their use of the indigénat disciplinary functions. ANOM Fonds AEF 1 H 74, 540/2, Décret du 30 novembre 1926, article 8; Décret du 27 février 1929. Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 21. See also Martin Chanock, Law, Custom and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985). SMEP/DEFAP Fonds Allégret: Cameroun 1920, Rapports d’Elie Allégret, Mission Protestant de Duala, 1921–1930; ANC APA 11016/G, Lettres de Mgr. Vogt, Père le Hunsec. See also Aggée Célestin Lomo Myazhiom, Sociétés et Rivalités religieuses au Cameroun sous domination Française (1916–1958) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001). Z01 WalkS book A.indb 31 16/04/2018 15:22 32 INTRODUCTION their doubts regarding Africans’ religious convictions.107 John Peel offers a rich example of how to carefully untangle the motives, inspirations, and transformations that animated African evangelists and converts but ultimately reminds us that religious change is often attendant with the emergence of both intense conflict and uneven or unjust power structures. As such, religion serves as a cosmology but also a means of shaping authority, community, and power relations between them.108 Although spiritual inspiration in southern Cameroon likely stemmed from or merged with social, economic, and cultural influences, French officials were convinced Africans could only mobilize for worldly concerns.109 Karen Fields, in her study of the Watchtower movement in Central Africa, offers an illuminating insight into how Christian revival can simultaneously emerge from a society’s reception of revealed wisdom about God and from resistance to political subordination. Inspired by interpretations of a salvation event, Watchtower adherents launched a millenarian movement that engaged in civil disobedience against chiefs, but also colonial authorities and missionaries, freeing themselves from both neo-traditional and modern controls to prepare for an entirely new existence.110 Fields rejects the “political view” of religious conversion that perceives “the cause of extraordinary belief lies in real social discontent” as well as the “cultural view” that assumes conversion was imposed by “stress occasioned by cultural change.”111 Fields recognizes that religion and politics were rarely separate realms in African societies. For the Watchtower followers, since the hope of salvation guided responsible action in everyday life, and spiritual belief was routine common sense, the supernatural was embedded in mundane social relations. Fields adds that 107 108 109 110 111 ACSSp. 2J1.10.12 Lucien Fourneau, Circulaire no. 26, Douala 5 juin 1917; ACSSp. 2J1.10.12, Père Pichon, “Une escroquerie administrative, 1927”; ANOM AFFPOL 2192/9 Lettre de Delavignette à M. le Ministre des Colonies à Paris, 5 septembre 1946; AFFPOL 2192/6 Les Missions religieuses au Cameroun, 1949–1954. Peel, Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. Curiously, French officials’ bias toward the secular was echoed decades later in historians’ analyses of African value-based mobilizations, in particular in the historiography of the interactions between (anti) colonial politics, identity politics, and Christian engagement. Terence Ranger has deconstructed debates on the Watchtower movement in Central Africa, where interpretations of the Christian revival movement as variously “anti-colonialist,” “nationalist,” “proto-nationalist,” “class-based,” or “proto-proletarian” occupied scholars for decades. Ranger credits Karen Fields with being the first to assess the Watchtower movement “in its own terms and within its own context rather than as a more or less distorted and unsatisfactory forerunner of nationalism or of class consciousness.” Terence O. Ranger, “Religious Movements and Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa,” African Studies Review 29, no. 2 (1986): 1–69. Fields, Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa. Fields, 19–20. Z01 WalkS book A.indb 32 16/04/2018 15:22 MARRIAGE AT THE NEXUS OF FAITH, POWER, & FAMILY 33 this recognition would be equally necessary when studying sixteenth-century Anabaptists or seventeenth-century Puritans – dovetailing Talal Asad’s argument that prior to Enlightenment methods of intellectual and political control, religion in Europe was similarly embodied in politics, economics, and social relations and was not considered “an otherworldly belief system.”112 Similar to Fields’s revivalists, African Protestant and Catholic catechists in Cameroon believed that their religious faith produced knowledge and judgments about the world of lived experience and that piety could sanction insurrection. However, they were not anti-colonial radicals. Despite being accused of such, catechists and other African Christian leaders in Cameroon typically sought to educate their lineages and societies about Christ’s revelation and then worked to displace or discipline those among them whose behaviors contradicted its realization. These forms of dissent were the result of both devotional and defiant feelings inspired by scripture and theological interpretation circulating in their local environment. African catechists’, priests, and pastors’ criticisms of chiefs, fathers, and French officials, combined with their superior ability to recruit faithful, obedient supporters who evaded labor conscription on railroads but volunteered to build churches and paid tithes but not taxes appeared to French officials as clear indications of “political hostility, under cover of religious conviction,” but the record bears little evidence of organized anti-colonial resistance.113 Nevertheless, African Christians’ mobilizations for religious and social reform prompted the French mandate administration to pass legislation that explicitly sought to contain their influence beginning in the late 1920s. Measures in the colonial judiciary had begun over a decade earlier as indigenous evangelists were prosecuted and harshly sentenced in the colonial courts for acts of insubordination and wielding undue influence.114 French governors interpreted Africans’ religious zeal as political defiance, as popular African clergymen and catechists provoked a full-scale “diminishment of native authority” and “imperiled the natural guardians of African races.”115 African communities 112 113 114 115 Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Derek Peterson has also detailed the intellectual history of the Enlightenment formation of “otherworldly” belief systems distinct from politics and economics. See Derek Peterson, “Gambling with God: Rethinking Religion in Colonial Central Kenya,” in The Invention of Religion: Rethinking Belief in Politics and History, ed. Derek Peterson and Darren Walhof (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 37–58. ANOM AFFPOL 2192/9 Lettre de Delavignette à M. le Ministre des Colonies à Paris, 5 septembre 1946. ANC APA 11016/G réglementation sur les cultes, Bonnecarrère 1933. ANC APA 11016/G Circulaire no. 78 application de la réglementation sur les cultes, du 16 sept. 1933; Louis-Paul Ngongo, Histoire des forces religieuses au Cameroun (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 1982), 60–1. Z01 WalkS book A.indb 33 16/04/2018 15:22 34 INTRODUCTION innovated novel forms of authority, which French officials believed was a dangerous divergence from the pathway toward advancement projected by colonial rule.116 As is apparent from the first edicts of Lucien Fourneau, the first civilian French governor of Cameroon, the mandate administration was never fully convinced of the possibility of real Christian conversion or of Africans’ ability to direct their own cultural adaptation. African catechists enhanced their power and multiplied their numbers considerably during the French mandate. By 1935, the Vicariate of Yaoundé counted 2500 African catechists and the Vicariate of Douala estimated 2000 in service in its jurisdiction, including non-salaried teachers.117 French officials’ complaints regarding catechists’ propensities to disrupt work on chiefs’ farms and evade concessionary and infrastructure projects were soon eclipsed by frantic objections to catechists’ conversions of women in polygamous marriages, who they then delivered to missions to be given new spouses.118 Administrators accused catechists of “scandal” and “disorder,” blaming them for “new currents and factors that have transformed the region sociologically and culturally.”119 Simultaneously, however, foreign officials expressed alarm at African chiefs’ “incontestably gruesome” polygamy, describing them as “a patriarchal regime in decadence.”120 Although African catechists and French officials may have been in agreement about chiefs’ abuses, high-level authorities worried that Christians’ criticisms and direct actions were “a dramatic upset, a premature reform … that would provoke action in the mileu social where instability is already too real a threat.”121 The furtherance of imposed chieftaincy in southern Cameroon despite officials’ misgivings demonstrates that disciplining black bodies was a jealously guarded function of the colonial state. Evidence that peer-organized reform was condemned also points to the fact that in interwar Cameroon, masculine authority was a subjectivity in the making. African evangelists instructed catechesis and promoted mutual cooperation and charitable assistance to 116 117 118 119 120 121 ACSSp. 2J1.2b2 Lettre de l’administration à Yaoundé à Mgr. Vogt, 12 Mai 1923. ACSSp. 2J1.13b1, statistiques Catholiques; ACSSp. 2J1.7a2, Abbé Michel Hardy, Cooperation missionnaire du Diocese de Séez, “Sur la Terre d’Afrique: Relation d’un voyage d’étude au Cameroun,” 8–27 Janvier 1968. ANOM AGEFOM 989/3419 Cameroun 1930–1931, Les Missions 1931; ANOM AGEFOM 989/3424 Justice 1927–1933. ANOM AGEFOM 989/3424 lettre de Guibert à le chef de circonscroiption d’Ebolowa, 7 jul 1932. ANOM AGEFOM 989/3424 Rapport du chef de subdivision de Sangmelima, Chefs superieurs M’Boutou Abeng et Mvondo Ekoa, 1932. ANOM AGEFOM 989/3424 Rapport du chef de subdivision de Sangmelima, Chefs superieurs M’Boutou Abeng et Mvondo Ekoa, 1932. Z01 WalkS book A.indb 34 16/04/2018 15:22 MARRIAGE AT THE NEXUS OF FAITH, POWER, & FAMILY 35 men and women in their villages and churches, but they also abducted chiefs’ wives, policed immoral behavior, and harshly reproached family fathers and other patriarchs for upholding commonplace practices like polygamy and bridewealth.122 In the late 1920s and 1930s, they continued to build their influence by coalescing into pious collectives, raising funds, and recruiting volunteers for their respective churches and denominations. For their part, chiefs innovated their commands and invented new taxes, married absent laborers’ wives, manipulated both customary and civil law to their advantage, and allied themselves with regional officials, plantation managers, and fellow chiefs to control laborers. Although imperial authorities worked to maintain their dominance, subordination and discipline were also techniques of African self-command. The Catechist as Catalyst: Innovating Masculinity and Moral Authority The dimensions of this book that examine Christian transmission, Christian marriage, and the invention of new forms of masculine power are in discussion with an evolving and exciting field of inquiry: the literature on African men and masculinities and how they shape organized resistance, intervention, and community defense. While colonial Cameroon was not a war zone during the mandate era, as scholars of organized male dissent like Danny Hoffman, William Minter, or Liisa Malkki discuss, this study, like that of Janet Roitman, looks at the “regimes of regulation” established by African Christian men to establish legitimacy in a period of violence and disruption.123 Hoffman’s analysis of the “resonant, even identical” activities of male violence and male productivity is particularly salient in this context as both African chiefs and African Christian principals innovated new modes of supervision, constraint, 122 123 This book employs the term “polygamy” rather than the more precise term, “polygyny,” because “polygamy” was the central referent of the local and foreign Christian agents of the time and place this book examines. Christian mobilizations centered on “polygamy,” and the term was deployed in nearly every religious missive, sermon, and catechism on marriage and the family. While the anthropological term “polygyny” more accurately refers to the phenomenon of plural wives and not simply “marriage with many spouses” (gender neutral), this book uses the term “polygamy” because when the historical agents of this work referred to “polygamy,” they assumed it to mean “plural wives.” William Minter, Apartheid’s Contras: An Inquiry Into the Roots of War in Angola and Mozambique (William Minter, 1994); Liisa Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology Mong Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Janet Roitman, Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Danny Hoffman, The War Machines: Young Men and Violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Z01 WalkS book A.indb 35 16/04/2018 15:22 36 INTRODUCTION and punishment for their respective subjects or followers within the arenas of marriage, labor management, and social control.124 African catechists expressed gendered identities through rhetorical ability, charismatism (manifestations of spiritual gifts), and ritual performance – all public demonstrations of authority typically reserved for men in the southern forest zone – as well as through exceptional acts such as confronting chiefs, police, and colonial officials.125 As forceful warriors for a social and spiritual cause, catechists provide an important example of masculine performance and the reconstitution of male identity outside of the structures of wage labor and war—more typical sites of historical analysis of evolving masculinity.126 In Cameroon, African catechists were quick to perceive chiefs’ abilities to control both concrete and abstract forms of power – the labor power of wives and clients, the power to deploy violence, and the powers of prestige. However, catechists soon established their own regulatory regime, which formally organized through lineages and villages in proximity to Christian missions, calling together kin and joining them with the resources of the mission, which included education, salaried employment, the press organs, and inclusion in corporate worship. These activities reinforced Christian leaders’ power to influence, organize, entrall, and, critically, compel their fellow men and women to obey commandments or challenge authorities.127 As in Roitman’s 124 125 126 127 Hoffman, The War Machines, 111. Foucault’s theory on the production of the political subject through contingent relations of dominance and resistance is also relevant here. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Vintage Books, 1977), 29–30. I am indebted to the analysis of Luise White, who remarked that among Mau Mau fighters, gender roles were “an integral part of their political struggle.” Luise White, “Separating the Men from the Boys: Constructions of Gender, Sexuality, and Terrorism in Central Kenya, 1939–1959,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 23, no. 1 (1990): 3. For histories of African wage labor, see Charles Van Onselen, Chibaro: African Mine Labour in Southern Rhodesia, 1900–1933 (London: Pluto Press, 1976); Jeanne Penvenne, African Workers & Colonial Racism: Mozambican Strategies & Struggles in Lourenco Marques, 1877–1962 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1994); Lisa A. Lindsay, “‘No Need… to Think of Home’? Masculinity and Domestic Life on the Nigerian Railway, c. 1940–61,” The Journal of African History 39, no. 3 (1998): 439–66; Lisa A. Lindsay, Working with Gender: Wage Labor and Social Change in Southwestern Nigeria (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003); Clive Glaser, “Managing the Sexuality of Urban Youth: Johannesburg, 1920s–1960s,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 38, no. 2 (2005): 301–27; Molly McCullers, “‘We Do It so That We Will Be Men’: Masculinity Politics in Colonial Namibia, 1915–49,” The Journal of African History 52, no. 1 (2011): 43–62. In his study of Christian Tswana men, Paul Landau refers to this cadre as the “conspiratory male core.” Landau, The Realm of the Word: Language, Gender, and Christianity in a Southern African Kingdom, 82. Z01 WalkS book A.indb 36 16/04/2018 15:22 MARRIAGE AT THE NEXUS OF FAITH, POWER, & FAMILY 37 study of the garrison-entrepôt in the Cameroon–Chad Basin, in which men operate outside of state control, African catechists engaged in regulation, accumulation, redistribution, and sociability while remaining largely exterior to governmental authority.128 Controlling the marriages, labor contributions, and even sexual relations of black bodies – using their own techniques and without the governmental approval granted to chiefs – were African Christians’ most subversive actions. These acts were not primarily (or not exclusively) about resistance, however. African Christian leaders and publics sought to constitute an alternative order to that of the colonial state and its associated chiefs, “responding,” as Father Jean-Luc Enyegue, a Cameroonian Jesuit, explained in an interview, “to a call to membership in a new sacramental structure with a new sacred identity.”129 Constructing an alternative membership structure bound by Christian conjugal and family alliances also demonstrates far more than a desire to rebel against fabricated facsimiles of African political community. It demonstrates that African believers in southern Cameroon in the interwar period constructed the symbolic systems, communities, and institutions of Christianity, thereby embedding the faith into the structures of everyday life and defining and extending the reach of their Church. Christianity in Cameroon’s History The history of Christianity in Cameroon has been memorialized in a considerable body of literature, much of which forwards that the profound and widespread influence of the Christian missions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries transformed African societies and their politics in a way that shaped – and continues to shape – modern national culture. Ecumenical histories such as those of Jean-Paul Messina and Jaap van Slageren, LouisPaul Ngongo, Jean-Marc Ela, Englebert Mveng, and Aggée Célestin Lomo Myazhiom have offered an expansive view of how myriad foreign Churches made Cameroon the locus of missionary interest throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and how confessional communities formed around these missions, who both opposed and emulated one another to heighten their own ecclesiastical and cultural prestige.130 Histories addressing the evolutions 128 129 130 Roitman, Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa, 299. Oral interview with Jean-Luc Enyegue, S.J., New York, February 25, 2016. Messina and Slageren, Histoire Du Christianisme Au Cameroun; Myazhiom, Sociétés et Rivalités religieuses au Cameroun sous domination Française (1916–1958). Ngongo, Histoire des forces religieuses au Cameroun. Jean-Marc Ela, “Le Droit à La Différence Ou l’enjeu Des Églises Locales En Afrique Noire,” in Civilisation Noire et Eglise Z01 WalkS book A.indb 37 16/04/2018 15:22 38 INTRODUCTION of particular Christian denominations are far more numerous and chronicle how simple missions became powerful cultural and institutional structures whose leadership systems and administrative networks arose from local sociocultural frameworks that compelled recognition of Church authority.131 A diverse range of historians, including many Cameroonian clergyscholars, have made substantive contributions in analyzing the dynamics of how Christian rites and beliefs, as well as sacred music, art, and ornamentation replaced or fused with the preexisting spiritual modes of expression of particular ethno-regional groups. Jean-Pierre Ombolo, Isidore Tabi, and Pierre Mviena, among others, have meticulously reconstructed the Beti cultural universe’s encounter with Catholicism and how Beti people inscribed the faith in ceremonies and commemorations of joy, pain, birth, death, and marriage.132 Célestine Colette Fouellefak Kana-Dongmo, Abraham Tetouom, 131 132 Catholique, ed. Société africaine de Culture (Paris: Editions Présence africaine, 1978), 204–17. See also Kengne Pokam, Les Églises Chrétiennes Face à La Montée Du Nationalisme Camerounais (Paris: Editions l’Harmattan, 1987); Engelbert Mveng, Histoire Des Églises Chrétiennes Au Cameroun: Les Origines (Yaoundé, Cameroon: Saint-Paul Mvolyé, 1990); Soeur Thérèse-Michèle Essomba Akamse, “Hommes et Femmes Pour Construire Ensemble l’Église En Afrique,” in Spiritualité et Libération En Afrique, ed. Engelbert Mveng (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1987), 79–83; Engelbert Mveng, Histoire du Cameroun (Paris: Présence africaine, 1963). Jaap Van Slageren, Les Origines de l’eglise Évangélique Du Cameroun: Missions Européennes et Christianisme Autochtone (Leiden: Brill, 1972); Messina, “Contribution Des Camerounais à l’expansion de l’Église Catholique Le Cas Des Populations Du SudCameroun, 1890–1961”; Jean-François Médard, “Les Eglises Protestantes Au Cameroun, Entre Tradition Authoritaire et Ethnicité,” in Religion et Transition Démocratique En Afrique, ed. François Constantin and Christian Coulon (Paris: Karthala, 1997), 189–220; Frédéric Fabre, Protestantisme et colonisation: l’évolution du discours de la mission protestante française au XXe siècle (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2011); LaburtheTolra, “La Mission Catholique Allemande Du Cameroun (1890–1916) et La Missologie”; Etaba, Histoire de l’Eglise Catholique Du Cameroun de Grégoire XVI à Jean-Paul II; F. Owono Ada, De La Mission de l’Église Catholique Camerounaise: Origine, Formation et Rôle Des Prêtres Noirs (Yaoundé: ENS, 1981). See also Eugene Wonyu, Le Chrétien, Les Dons et La Mission Dans l’Eglise Africaine Independente: Réflexions d’un Laïc (Douala: Eglise Protestante Camerounaise (BP 5421), 1979). Mviena, Univers Culturel et Religieux Du Peuple Beti; Jean-Pierre Ombolo, Etre Beti, Un Art Africain d’etre Un Homme et de Vivre En Societe?: Essai d’analyse de l’esprit d’une Population : Une Etude Ethno-Historique (Collection Societes) (Yaoundé: Presses Universitaires de Yaoundé, 2000); Isidore Tabi, La Theologie Des Rites Beti: Essai d’explication Religieuse Des Rites Beti et Ses Implications Socio-Culturelles (Yaoundé, Cameroon: Éditions St. Paul, 1991); Isidore Tabi, Les Rites Beti Au Christ. Essai de Pastorale Liturgique Sur Quelques Rites de Nos Ancêtres (Yaoundé: Imprimerie Saint-Paul, 1991); Isidore Tabi, “Cameroun Terre Mariale: Les Sanctuaires et Centres de Pélerinage Marial du Cameroun” (Ndonko, Cameroun, 1995). Z01 WalkS book A.indb 38 16/04/2018 15:22 MARRIAGE AT THE NEXUS OF FAITH, POWER, & FAMILY 39 and Odette Djoumessi Dongmo and Antoine Nguimzang have paid particular attention to the work of Bamileke authority figures and powerful agents among African societies in western Cameroon, who incorporated Christian texts and sacraments into local allegiance rituals.133 Other researchers who have studied Presbyterianism among the Bulu and Baptist, Lutheran, and Catholic Christianity among the Bamoun, Bassa, and Duala societies have similarly chronicled the coordinated and interdependent processes of forging a denominational and an ethnic identity.134 Copious biographies and autobiographies of Cameroonian pastors, priests, nuns, and catechists have also uncovered the expansive autonomy wielded by African Christian principals in their respective Churches as well as within their societies of origin, demonstrating the seamless congruence that evolved over a century of Christian exposure between spiritual and worldly leadership.135 133 134 135 Odette Djoumessi Dongmo and Antoine Nguimzang, Djoumessi Mathias, 1900–1966: Un Exemple de Chef Traditionnel Chrétien (Yaoundé, Cameroon: Éditions SOPECAM, 1991); Célestine Colette Fouellefak Kana-Dongmo, “Acteurs locaux de l’implantation du catholicisme dans le pays Bamiléké au Cameroun,” Chrétiens et sociétés. XVIe–XXIe siècles, no. 13 (December 31, 2006); Abraham Tetouom, “La polygamie et le Christianisme au pays Bamiléké” (Faculté libre de théologie protestante, 1966). Paul Richard Dekar, “Crossing Religious Frontiers: Christianity and the Transformation of Bulu Society, 1892–1925” (University of Chicago, 1978); Jean-Pierre Yetna, “Les Bassa et Mpoo Du Cameroun à La Recherche de l’unité Perdue,” Anthropos 97, no. 2 (January 1, 2002): 551–2; Judith Njele, “Les Débuts Du Christianisme et Son Évolution En Pays Bamoun Au Cameroun” (Université Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2005); Austen and Derrick, Middlemen of the Cameroons Rivers; René Bureau, “Ethno-Sociologie Religieuse Des Duala et Apparentés,” Recherches et Etudes Camerounaises 1&2, no. 8 (1962): 1–369. Francis Grob, Témoins Camerounais de l’Evangile (Les Origines de L’Eglise Evangélique) (Yaoundé, Cameroon: Editions CLE, 1967); François Akoa-Mongo, Le Pasteur François Akoa Abômô: l’homme et l’oeuvre (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris Corp, 2011); Jean-Paul Messina, Des témoins camerounais de l’evangile: Andre Kwa Mbange (Yaoundé, Cameroun: Presses de l’UCAC, 2001); Jean Zoa, “La Dot Dans Les Territoires d’Afrique,” in Femmes Africaines; Témoignages de Femmes Du Cameroun, Du Congo Belge, Du Congo Français, de La Côte-d’Ivoire, Du Dahomey, Du Ghana, de La Guinéa, de La Haute-Voita, Du Nigéria, Du Togo, Réunies à Lome Par l’Union Mondiale Des Organisations Féminines Catholiques, 1958, ed. l’Union mondiale des organisations feminines catholiques (Paris: Editions du Centurion, 1959), 53–71; Jean-Henri Tiandong, L’autobiographie Du Pasteur Jean-Henri Tiandong de l’E.E.C. (Douala: Douala, S.N., 1973); Soeur Gertude Thérèse Kibénél Ngo Billong, Noces de Grâce de La Congrégation Des Soeurs Servantes de Marie de Douala: 70 Ans d’existence (Douala: Congrégation des Soeurs Servantes de Marie de Douala, 2009); Joseph Kuate, S.C.J., Théologie de Deux Pasteurs de l’Eglise Camerounaise: Mgr. Jean Zoa et Mgr. Albert Ndongmo (Yaoundé: Presses de l’Université Catholique d’Afrique Centrale, 2012). Z01 WalkS book A.indb 39 16/04/2018 15:22 40 INTRODUCTION These scholars and others effectively demonstrate that African Christians appropriated the empowering discourses and goals of the Churches in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, while they rightly acknowledge that foreign missionaries relied heavily on local contributions, they rarely detail the mechanisms and pressures African Christian leaders asserted to convene a broad mass of followers or how they inspired reverence for the faith. Further, many histories tend to highlight the cultural and political nature of the consequences of building new religious boundaries and forms of social differentiation.136 In these, the focus largely remains on the evolution of particular ethno-linguistic identities through denominational attachments or on the development of individual Protestant or Catholic denominations in an African context, rendering the histories factionally divided and focused on forms of institutional progress. This is limiting in several ways, as the task all African believers assigned themselves – in the words of Cameroonian theologian Jean-Marc Ela – was not to solidify old identities or administer the institution of Christianity but rather “to advance the future.”137 Even in superb works of history and philosophy by Cameroonian scholars such as Fabien Eboussi-Boulaga and Meinrad Hegba, which detail the emergence of the dialectic between African knowledge and Christian tradition – made possible through the agency of African Christians – there is little discussion of the deeply impactful actions and agendas of a wide range of opposing or correlative secular forces that determined how Christian theology would resonate from within.138 This book seeks to uncover the spiritual and the 136 137 138 Laburthe-Tolra, “La Mission Catholique Allemande Du Cameroun (1890–1916) et La Missologie”; Laburthe-Tolra, Vers La Lumiere? Ou, Le Désir d’Ariel: A Propos Des Beti Du Cameroun: Sociologie de La Conversion; Philippe Laburthe-Tolra, “Intentions missionnaires et perception africaine : quelques données camerounaises,” Civilisations. Revue internationale d’anthropologie et de sciences humaines 41, no. 1/2 (1993): 239–55; Louis-Paul Ngongo, “Pouvoir Politique Occidental Dans Les Structures de l’Église En Afrique,” in Civilisation Noire et Eglise Catholique, ed. Société africaine de Culture (Paris: Editions Présence africaine, 1978), 37–56; Ngongo, Histoire des forces religieuses au Cameroun. Jean-Marc Ela, Ma Foi d’Africain (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 1985), 63. Some of the most complex accounts of the evolutions of African Christian identity (which are analyzed as part of broader transformations in African identity in general) in Cameroon (and in Africa broadly) are found in works by Fabian Eboussi-Boulaga and Meinrad Hegba. See Fabien Eboussi-Boulaga, “Le Bantou problématique,” Présence Africaine 66, no. 1 (1968): 5–40; Fabien Eboussi Boulaga, “Pour Une Catholicité Africaine,” in Civilisation Noire et Eglise Catholique, ed. Société africaine de Culture (Paris: Editions Présence africaine, 1978), 331–70; Meinrad P. Hebga, Personnalité africaine et catholicisme (Paris: Présence africaine, 1963); Ela, “L’Eglise, Le Monde Noir et Le Concile.” Z01 WalkS book A.indb 40 16/04/2018 15:22 MARRIAGE AT THE NEXUS OF FAITH, POWER, & FAMILY 41 secular forces in conversation with one another – how individuals’ and groups’ beliefs about the world of the spirit – the invisible world – influenced and engaged with their choices in the world of lived experience.139 What remains to be revealed is how common religious vernaculars developed among the territory’s diverse societies not only as a result of novel and broad-scale religious attachments but also as a response to the dramatic transformations in ethical, legal, and political norms that governed Cameroon’s societies.140 Critically, this study examines the marital and familial relationships among African Catholics and Protestants in southern Cameroon in order to demonstrate the fundamentally intimate process of localizing the Christian Churches as well as the Christian faith itself. In the years between the onset of the First World War and the beginning of the Second, Africans experienced new pressures, opportunities, and forms of power, which led them to reconsider the roles, significance, advantages, and failings of their marriages and their relationships to their blood kin. Africans recognized that by expanding the missions’ agency through schools, prayer groups, fraternities, and charities, they could more effectively gain control over the dynamics that were fracturing families and disassociating lineage members from one another. This 139 140 Notions of (and terms for) the “invisible” and its relation to spiritual obscurity, the realm of unknown forces, and the uncertain (as opposed to the world of lived experience) are known in many societies in southern Cameroon. Laburthe-Tolra uses the term “the invisible world” extensively when discussing the religious realm of the Beti, Guimera reveals the Evuzok of the Kribi region employ the term mgbël to mean “the world of the invisible” or “the nocturnal world,” and de Rosny shares that the Duala referred to ndimsi to mean “all that is beyond the vision and knowledge of common mortals” and “the hidden side of things.” Laburthe-Tolra, Vers La Lumiere? Ou, Le Désir d’Ariel: A Propos Des Beti Du Cameroun: Sociologie de La Conversion, 16–20; L.M. Guimera, Ni Dos Ni Ventre: Religion, Magie et Sorcellerie Evuzok (Paris: Société d’Ethnographie, 1981); Eric de Rosny, Les Yeux de Ma Chèvre: Sur Les Pas Des Maîtres de La Nuit En Pays Douala (Paris: Plon, 1981). Despite the broad and varied accounts of the Christian Churches in Cameroon in the early twentieth century, more recent scholarship has been written with reference to the politicized roles of European and African Catholic and Protestant leaders during the violent conflagrations that characterized nationalist expression during the postwar years. Christians in the laity and the clergy expressed diverse political messages of the end of empire, but largely consistent European clerical condemnation of the politics and militarized action of the leftist anti-colonial political party, the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC), has complicated the history of Christianity’s role in Cameroonian national self-determination. See Richard A. Joseph, Radical Nationalism in Cameroon: Social Origins of the U.P.C. Rebellion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); Bayart, “Les Rapports Entre Les Églises et l’État Du Cameroun de 1958 à 1971”; David E. Gardinier, Cameroon: United Nations Challenge to French Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963). Z01 WalkS book A.indb 41 16/04/2018 15:22 42 INTRODUCTION book demonstrates that it was not in the conferral of ecclesiastical leadership positions such as bishoprics or synod directorships in the late 1950s that marked the emergence of fully “African” Christian Churches; rather, African Christianity and its institutions grew from the more subtle forms of church organizing, entrepreneurial leadership, and interrelational evangelism of the interwar years. This analysis owes much to Philippe Laburthe-Tolra, who has contributed the most to illuminating the interior lives of Africans as they experienced Christianity as an embodied physical and intellectual process –not simply as a foreign and otherworldly set of beliefs.141 The Organization of the Text Part I of this book focuses on the first decade of French presence between 1914 and 1925, and the social politics and religious feelings emergent in an era of scarcity and disrupted foreign imperial and missionary authority. In this period, French rule advanced from a transitional phase of military occupation to a fully-fledged colonial administration overseen by the League of Nations, in which governance strategy emphasized mise en valeur and a clear sense of authority vis-à-vis local rulers and African subjects, per governors Théodore Paul Marchand and Paul Bonnecarrère’s visions. In this decade, African chiefs claimed a steadily increasing share of power and income by wielding administrative and police powers and impressing local populations into coercive labor systems. At the same time, Africans joined into new religious communities in which they were considered equal members, but also subject to the authority of the local church. Africans’ willingness to enter into domains of discipline managed by new spiritual authorities and their emergent activism in the realms 141 Philippe Laburthe-Tolra, Minlaaba: Histoire et Société Traditionnelle Chez Les Bëti Du Sud-Cameroun, 3 vols (Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, 1977); Laburthe-Tolra, Les Seigneurs de La Forêt: Essai Sur Le Passé Historique, l’organisation Sociale et Les Norms Éthiques Des Anciens Béti Du Cameroun; Laburthe-Tolra, “Intentions missionnaires et perception africaine : quelques données camerounaises,” 239; LaburtheTolra, Initiations et Sociétés Secrètes Au Cameroun: Les Mystères de La Nuit : Essai Sur La Religion Beti, Volume 1; Curt Von Morgen, A Travers Le Cameroun Du Sud Au Nord: Voyages et Explorations Dans l’Arrière Pays de 1889 à 1891, trans. Philippe Laburthe-Tolra, Publications de la Sorbonne, Série: Afrique 7 (Paris: Serge Fleury, 1982); Georg Zenker and Philippe Laburthe-Tolra, Yaoundé, d’après Zenker (1895): le plan de 1892, Extrait des Annales de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de Yaoundé, 2 (Yaoundé, Cameroon, 1970). Laburthe-Tolra’s skills as an ethnologist and anthropologist allowed him to know the intimate history of the Beti society in Cameroon and the transformation of their religious knowledge systems during an era when new pressures and incentives forced divisions that widened further with each new arrival of a European colonizer. Z01 WalkS book A.indb 42 16/04/2018 15:22 MARRIAGE AT THE NEXUS OF FAITH, POWER, & FAMILY 43 of marriage and the family demonstrates their autonomy within Christian communities and the degree to which they shaped the process by which they became converts and devout members. At the time, it also demonstrated to the French administration that the colonial objective of constructing African political consciousness around chiefs and strong patriarchs was floundering in the face of tens of thousands of Africans who were developing alternative and self-directed forms of communal association. Chapters 2 and 3 provide evidence that rather than subduing the tumult of colonial transition, Africans who engaged with Christianity maneuvered through its disruptions and found openings to lead. These early chapters demonstrate how African Catholics and Protestants became mission leaders and overseers by default, and then used their position to forge new collective loyalties to Christian institutions such as schools or congregations, which they then merged with preexisting lineage, clan, or ethno-linguistic affiliations. Religious routines structured by the mass or weekly service and participation in the sacraments and catechism were solidified by the associationalism of language and local identity, and allowed for formally organized action to emerge. Chapters 4 and 5 reveal that in this insecure time in which traditions were challenged, modified, or abandoned, Christian families consciously sought to renew patterns of communal reciprocity, family cohesion, and social trust. Religious messaging on sexual and conjugal ethics resonated with many who lived in the orbit of the missions as they recognized the confluence of factors that transformed social relations and marriage practices into unrecognizable forms of exchange or competition. Africans expressed feelings of social havoc in confession, catechism, and church meetings, and criticized local potentates’ exploitation of local marital customs. African Catholic and Protestant catechists thus mobilized collective spiritual attachments to Christian marriage and shaped local populations’ receptivity to evangelical messages on marriage and the family by offering a solution to the consequences of colonialism. By focusing on couples and families, African evangelists also strengthened village, community, and linguistic solidarities, localized Christian identities, and created regional attachments to elements of the family reform agenda that resonated most strongly with particular communities.142 This process was 142 ACSSp. 2J1.7b4 L’Action Sociale des Missions Catholiques au Cameroun 1925” conférénce avec la Société de Géographie; “Missions Catholiques Au Cameroun,” L’Eveil Du Cameroun, no. 374 (août 1939). Weekly mission journals and magazines during the interwar period included Jumele la bana ba Kamerun (The Awakening of the Children of Cameroon), a journal published in the Duala language in 1934 by the French Protestant Mission, as well as Kaso, a Protestant youth magazine, Mefoe (News), the Bulu Presbyterian newsletter, The Drum Call, a Presbyterian newsletter, and L’Effort Camerounais, Le Cameroun Catholique, Vie Nouvelle, and Nleb Bekristen, some of the Z01 WalkS book A.indb 43 16/04/2018 15:22 44 INTRODUCTION undoubtedly forceful, but it was also incorporative and influenced not only Africans’ understandings of how to unite bodies and souls, but also how to produce new cultures. Part II of the book examines the years between 1925 and 1939, when African small farmers, traders, merchants, transporters, and other agents in the Nyong-et-Sanaga and Abong Mbang territories in central southern Cameroon, as well as the Nyong Valley and Ebolowa regions further south, and Yabassi and Dschang in the west, shared a greater proportion of agricultural wealth.143 Economic possibilities and more fluid communication between city and countryside meant that the cultural horizons of rural life broadened, and men and women took advantage of opportunities to transmit their grievances, aspirations, and ideas to each other and form support networks through the clergy, school, church, or pious confraternity. Catechists in Ebolowa and regions with similarly prosperous agriculture remarked that young men had difficulty fulfilling the bridewealth demands of wealthy cocoa planters, who demanded large sums and modern luxuries like bicycles. Even when these men found work in towns, they were often unable to amass the required demands.144 Many young Africans in Catholic associations confessed to being “shackled” to the demands of their elders and frustrated in their 143 144 Catholic newspapers. See also Philippe Nken Ndjeng, L’idée nationale dans le Cameroun francophone: 1920–1960 (Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 2012). The territorial administration estimated that 4 million coffee plants had been planted in the Mungo region in 1939 by African planters. By 1947, there were 6 million coffee plants cultivated by African farmers in Mungo, Dschang, and Foumban. Eugène Guernier and René Briat, Cameroun, Togo, Encyclopédie de l’Afrique Française (Paris: Éditions de l’Union Française, 1951), 202–3. See also W. Gervase Clarence-Smith, “Plantation versus Smallholder Production of Cocoa: The Legacy of the German period in Cameroon,” in Peter Geschiere and Piet Konings, eds, Pathways to Accumulation in Cameroon (Paris: Karthala, 1993), 187–216; Eckert, “African Rural Entrepreneurs and Labor in the Cameroon Littoral,” 115–17; Monga, “The Emergence of Duala Cocoa Planters under German Rule in Cameroon: A Case Study of Entrepreneurship,” Rapport Annuel adressé par le gouvernement français pour l’année 1927, APA 11016/K, ANC. See also Schwarz, Cocoa in the Cameroons under French Mandate and in Fernando Po. ACSSp. 2J1.15.b2, lettre 24 juin 1941; Robert Kpwang also has extensively documented the wife-hoarding that occurred among Bulu chiefs in Ebolowa. Kpwang K. Robert, “Les Bulu de La Subdivision de Kribi Face Aux Méthodes Musclées Des Chefs Des Groupements Bulu-Centre (Ebemvok) et Bulu-Sud (Zingui) (1920–1944),” in La Cheffrie “Traditionnelle” Dans Les Socitétés de La Grande Zone Forestière Du Sud-Cameroun (1850–2010), ed. Kpwang K. Robert (Paris et Cameroun: L’Harmattan, 2011), 139–69. Clement Egerton noted in 1939 that 40 percent of men in Ebolowa were unmarried “because they do not have the money to get wives.” F. Clement C. Egerton, African Majesty: A Record of Refuge at the Court of the King of Bangangté in the French Cameroons (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1939), 46. Z01 WalkS book A.indb 44 16/04/2018 15:22 MARRIAGE AT THE NEXUS OF FAITH, POWER, & FAMILY 45 attempts to build a Christian life centered on “autonomie familiale.”145 As they were unable to renounce marriage prestation, these men typically entered into complex debt arrangements in order to establish some form of family status in an ever-more competitive economic environment. Thus, in the second decade of French rule, the ruptures and privation of the early post-World War I years gave way to greater sufficiency, but with it came inequality and corruption. Economic growth was destabilizing to African family life in a different way than economic hardship had been. Greater circulations of wealth gave rise to more competition for laborers as well as speculation and extortion of bridewealth, which created new risks and debt burdens for young grooms. Additionally, by 1930, indigénat regulations fully governed forced labor in Cameroon, and the Decree of 21 August 1930 updated and expanded the powers of French officials and African chiefs and their guards to recruit labor in the provinces.146 This triggered new expressions of social activism in African Christian communities led by increasingly organized and influential collectives known as confréries (pious confraternities). This, in turn, caused colonial officials to relentlessly prosecute indigenous evangelists for insubordination and rebellion.147 African Christian men not only expressed their outrage at these kinds of administrative reactions, they vigorously recruited men and women to their congregations to serve, worship, and defend communities of believers, which the administration found “hostile” to systems of law and order.148 145 146 147 148 ACSSp. 2J1.7a7, Union Missionnaire du Clergé, juillet 1948; Direction Diocésaine des Oeuvres, Yaoundé, Les Prêtres de l’Archdiocese de Yaoundé S’Interrogent, 1959. ANOM Fonds AEF, 1 H 74, 540/2, Décret instituant le travail obligatoire au Cameroun, Titre I, Chapitre I, Article 4, 21 août 1930. According to Article 2 of the Décret du 21 August 1930 regulating the open recruitment of forced labor in Cameroon, the term “travail obligatoire” or “forced labor” applied to all services rendered by an individual for the execution of public construction. Those who were exempt from forced labor included: African members of the police force, those Africans who were part of an organization under contract or engaged with the colonial administration in some way in which they received a salary, Sultans, Lamibés, Head Chiefs of a region, canton, or village, members of the Council of Notables, agricultural commissions, or other consulting commissions organized in a specific territory, members of indigenous tribunals (tribunaux indigènes), those who had received medals from the French government, or those who had earned the Ordre du Mérite Indigène, owners of important plantations or profitable farms who “contributed to the mise en valeur of the colony,” or anyone who was “successfully and profitably exploiting an area of more than ten hectares,” as well as stipulations for “those Africans who have been previously recruited for long periods, and fathers of large families.” APA 11016/G réglementation sur les cultes, Bonnecarrère 1933. ACSSp. 2J1.10.7 Père Van Bulck, S.J., avec Mr. de Calbiac, commissaire de police à Yaoundé, 17 mai 1932. Z01 WalkS book A.indb 45 16/04/2018 15:22 46 INTRODUCTION Reminded on every side of their relatively peripheral status in evangelical work vis-à-vis African religious principals in the second decade of French rule, foreign missionaries turned to challenging the administration’s restrictions on religious activity, which became increasingly severe during the 1930s. By and large, Catholic and Protestant missionary societies supported African catechists, evangelists, and eventually priests and pastors’ strategies for forming confessional communities through families, kin networks, and ethno-regional societies. Religious denominations were ethnically and linguistically diverse, which deepened foreign missionaries’ dependency on local interlocutors. As Brother Azeufack related to me during an interview, “the mission was everyone’s affair.”149 Priests, pastors, laymen, catechists, catechumens, curious villagers, volunteers, French bishops, African nuns, and all those who engaged with evangelism and social work in southern Cameroon in the second half of the interwar period developed the Christian missions into autonomous, African-led congregations with localized identities. Chapters 6 and 7 demonstrate that in the second decade of the interwar period, the primary architects of migration, labor organization, and social loyalties – African catechists and chiefs – intensified their struggle with each other, resulting in hundreds of catechists’ and Christians’ arrests, as well as the murder of a French priest.150 Shared experiences of rebuke and punishment also shaped African Christian principals’ ability to influence their followers’ perceptions of who was deserving of sympathy, compassion, and assistance. Developing the impetus to remedy and assist as part of Christian morality allowed young African Christians to recognize themselves as selfdetermining individuals as well as sustainers of righteous acts. The means by which African communities extended their religious solidarities became critical foundations for rural mobilizations against constraints on labor, marriage, and family-building, which often took the form of radical intrusions in the domestic sphere. As new interdependencies fostered growing senses of reciprocity and mutuality among Christian cohorts they also catalyzed bold and entrepreneurial forms of resistance to local enemies of Christian marriage and family-building. The final chapters of the book demonstrate how indigenous Christian men in the laity as well as the clergy channeled the power of ecclesiastical discipline to reform the domestic sphere through developing women’s personal piety 149 150 Oral interview, Fr. Philippe Azeufack, S.J., Résidence St. François Xavier, Yaoundé Cameroon, May 30, 2014. See Alexandre Le Roy, Un Martyr de La Morale Chrétienne, Le Père Henri de Maupeou de La Congrégation Du Saint-Esprit, Missionnaire Au Cameroun (Paris: Editions Dillen/Maison Mère des Pères du Saint-Esprit, 1936). Z01 WalkS book A.indb 46 16/04/2018 15:22 MARRIAGE AT THE NEXUS OF FAITH, POWER, & FAMILY 47 and loyalty to the monogamous, paternally centralized home. As indigenous catechists and congregational leaders became the most visible and influential messengers of the benefits inherent to monogamous coupling and the perils of polygamy, they conceptually intertwined redemption with male sovereignty. African women in Christian marriages often experienced greater restrictions on their personal behavior and freedom of movement, as well as judgments about their moral character as a result of the growing influence of the church in intimate life. Although missions funded and operated women’s schools, clinics, and noviciates, women also typically had fewer institutional resources from which to draw than men to coordinate their own activities. While, in the 1930s, a highly networked indigenous Christian charitable complex emerged among Christian publics, which provided more opportunities for women to advance in the realms of social work, health care, and education, married women still found themselves at odds with the new patriarchal and disciplinary order enforced and managed by African Christian men. This section as a whole demonstrates the while the Christian Churches espoused radical agendas for justice that clashed with the French mandate administration’s ultimately conservative vision of colonial order, Christian radicalism remained firmly rooted in gendered conceptions of morality and equality. These last chapters also demonstrate how much African Christians modulated precolonial models of male political authority and family management while appropriating and adapting paradigmatic Christian patriarchal ideals. Conclusion Important studies have recently emerged that focus on marriage and the household as significant and contested categories of historical production in Africa.151 Investigating marriage’s implication in wider social and political relationships allows for better understandings of how marriages and families create formal communities with rules for membership and techniques of constituting belonging. Extending this thrust of investigation into the public role of “private” life, this book focuses on marriage and the family as critical sites of religious production. Scholars have struggled to define “religion,” but this book conceives of Christianity and religion in general as both a way of experiencing reality and 151 Osborn, Our New Husbands Are Here: Households, Gender, and Politics in a West African State from the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule; Jean-Baptiste, Conjugal Rights; Burrill, States of Marriage: Gender, Justice, and Rights in Colonial Mali. For an excellent review of how these works are in conversation with each other, see Insa Nolte, “New Histories of Marriage and Politics in Africa,” Gender & History 29, no. 3 (2017): 742–8. Z01 WalkS book A.indb 47 16/04/2018 15:22 48 INTRODUCTION a set of doctrinal formulations.152 Recognizing the importance of the affective dimension of religion as well as the disciplinary dimension required by religious teachings, doctrines, and creeds allows the historian to perceive the social hierarchies and the emotional bonds, the desires and agonies of relationships and the rules of sociability that make marriage and family powerful engines for spiritual experience and institution building. Before the arrival of Christianity, there was no precise word for “religion” among many societies in southern Cameroon. In the case of the Beti, LaburtheTolra explains it is likely because there is no single word that captures the Beti people’s “profound feelings concerning the invisible world,” nor one that identifies their “intensity and frequency of relations with the invisible.”153 Among the coastal Duala, who embodied spirituality in everyday words and deeds, the normal salutation historically was (and remains today), nj’e tuse é? (Who gives you life?), to which the response is, Njambé (God, or the supreme ancestor and creator).154 In these communities, as in many others, the preexisting conceptual order was one in which all knowledge and habits of living creatures were made possible through spiritual power. As relations with the invisible were the framework of daily life for many of southern Cameroon’s diverse societies, one must study the organization of daily life –moments of sociability, repeated behaviors, representations of identity – in order to understand changes in religious belief.155 Religious practices appear to have changed rather quickly among the indigenous societies living in French Cameroon, but then, so did political and economic behaviors. By the end of the first decade of French rule, a veritable Christian-led family reform movement had emerged among the territory’s estimated 130,000 Catholics and 60,000 Protestants that gained full force in the decade leading up to World War II.156 This movement emphasized con152 153 154 155 156 For more on framing “religion,” see Victoria S. Harrison, “The Pragmatics of Defining Religion in a Multi-Cultural World,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 59, no. 3 (2006): 133–52. Laburthe-Tolra, Les Seigneurs de La Forêt: Essai Sur Le Passé Historique, l’organisation Sociale et Les Norms Éthiques Des Anciens Béti Du Cameroun, 17. René Bureau, Anthropologie, Religions Africaines et Christianisme (Paris: Karthala, 2002), 192. Laburthe-Tolra, Les Seigneurs de La Forêt: Essai Sur Le Passé Historique, l’organisation Sociale et Les Norms Éthiques Des Anciens Béti Du Cameroun, 17–18. Vicaires apostoliques du Cameroun, “Le Catholicisme Au Cameroun,” Informations Catholiques Internationales, March 15, 1957, 44 edition; Bengt Sundkler and Christopher Steed, A History of the Church in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 756; Engelbert Mveng, Album Du Centenaire: 1890–1990: L’Eglise Catholique Au Cameroun, 100 Ans d’évangélisation (Yaoundé: Conférence Episcopale National du Cameroun, 1990), 45–50. Z01 WalkS book A.indb 48 16/04/2018 15:22 MARRIAGE AT THE NEXUS OF FAITH, POWER, & FAMILY 49 sented, costless, and companionate monogamous coupling as a practice and as a worldview that verified their humanity and enabled spiritual catharsis. Over time, Christian marriages in Cameroon became a means of reproducing the culture of the religious community to which spouses belonged, signifying adherence to the values espoused by the Church, or attaining status or strengthening partnerships that were corollaries of one’s association with the faith. Christian marriage was perceived, in the words of Terence Ranger, “in terms of its ability to meet the religious, and social and political, needs of individuals.”157 However, it was often not merely an individualistic symbolic or pragmatic act. African Christian leaders embedded Christian marriage in the social pedagogy of Christian evangelism that supported the restructuring of family and community life around more dutiful, stable, and complementary relations between the sexes, which extended to parents, kin, and the entire lineage. What this work as a whole will reveal is how, in this period of dramatic change, African Christians enfranchised themselves to determine the renovation of their spiritual and cultural forms in a period when foreign agents competed with each other to confer such measures on them.158 157 158 Terence Ranger, “Missionary Adaptation of African Religious Institutions: The Masasi Case,” in The Historical Study of African Religion, ed. Terence Ranger and I.N. Kimambo (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1972), 221. In this way, this book extends Foster’s analysis of the “Catholic civilizing mission” that she demonstrates was clarified and transformed by French missionaries in Africa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and highlights the ways in which civilizing projects based on Christian doctrine emerged within African societies and connected or competed with foreign initiatives. See Foster, Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880–1940. Z01 WalkS book A.indb 49 16/04/2018 15:22